OINBURGH 



IS sreveNsoi 





Glass_ 



A '63 



Book . £: 3 S ^(a 






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EDINBURGH 



John Knox's House, lii^li Street. 



EDINBURGH 

V - y BY 

R. L. STEVENSON 



WITH 24 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 



JAMES HERON 



NEW YORK 
CHARLKS SCRIBNER'S SONS 

LONDON : SEF.LKY, SF.RVICE U CO I,TD 
I912 



/^^zv 






CONTENTS 



CHAP. I. INTRODUCTORY 

II. OLD TOWN THE LANDS 

III. THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 

IV. LEGENDS 
V. GREYFRIARS 

VI. NEW TOWN TOWN AND COUNTRY 

VII, THE VILLA QUARTERS . 

VIII. THE CALTON HILL 

IX. WINTER AND NEW YEAR 

X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 



17 

37 

57 

75 

93 

113 

133 

139 

159 

.83 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

JOHN KNOx's HOUSE, HIGH STREET . FrOlltlspiece V 

LADV stair's close, LAWNMARKET . . 20 ■ 

QUEEN MARV'S BATH HOUSE, HOLYROOD . . 29, 

JAMEs' COURT, LAWNMARKET . . ' . 40 

CARDINAL Beaton's house, formerly in the 

COWGATE . . . . 49 . 

CATHEDRAL OF S F. GILES AS IT WAS IN THE 

EARLY PART OF LAST CENTURY . 60v 

THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH . . . 69 - 

PLAYHOUSE CLOSE, CANONGATE . . . 82 ' 
12 



List of Illustrations 

HEAD OF THE WEST HOW . . .87 

CANDLEMAKER ROW, CREYFRIARS . I02^ 

THE FOOT OF CANONGATE . . 1 07 

PRINCES STREET, EDINBURGH . . 122- 

HOLYROOD PALACE FROM THE CALTON HILL . I 27. 

EDINBURGH FROM THE CALTON HILL . I42 

THE CASTLE FROM THE GRASSMARKET . . 147/ 

THE CASFLE FROM PRINCES STREET GARDENS I 52. 

DUDDINGSTON LOCH AND ARTHUr's SEAT. l6l- 

HIGH SCHOOL WYND, LOOKING TOWARDS THE COW- 
GATE . . . . . l66' 

CRAIGMILLAR CASTLE . . . 17I . 

THE MARQUIS OF HUNTLy's HOUSE, BAKEHOUSE 

CLOSE, CANONGATE . . 1 76 ' 

•3 



List of Illustrations 

PAGI 

THE PENTLAND HILLS FROM SWANSTON . . 185 V 

DUDDINGSTON CHURCH FROM THE LOCH . . 1 90"^ 

THE CASTLE FROM THE VENNEL . . . 195^ 

THE HAMLET OF SWANSTON . . . 20I^ 



H 



INTRODUCTORY 



C II APT !<: R I 

INTRODDCrOKY 

T\\]i nncicnt and famous mctrojK)lis of 
tlic North sits overlooking a windy 
estuary Irom the slope and summit of 
three hills. No situation could he more com- 
manding for the head city of a kingdom ; none 
!)etter chosen lor noMe prospects. I'Vom iier 
tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks 
far and wide on the sea and hroad champaigns. 
1\) the east you may catch at sunset the spark 
of the May lighthouse, where the I-'irth expands 
into the (icrman Ocean ; and away to the 
west, over all the carse of Stirling, you can 
see the first snows upon Ben Ledi. 

But Fdinhurgh pays cruelly for her high 
seat in one of the vilest climiites under heaven. 
She is liable to be be:iten upon by :ill the winds 

'7 



Introductory 

that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be 
buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and 
powdered with the snow as it comes flying 
southward from the Highland hills. The 
weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty 
and ungenial in summer, and a downright 
meteorological purgatory in the spring. The 
delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among 
bleak winds and plumping rain, have been 
sometimes tempted to envy them their fate. 
For all who love shelter and the blessings of 
the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual 
tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be 
found a more unhomely and harassing place of 
residence. Many such aspire angrily after that 
ScMiiewhere-else of the imagination, where all 
troubles are supposed to end. They lean over 
the great bridge which joins the New Town 
with the Old — that windiest spot, or high altar, 
in this northern temple ot the winds — and 
watch the trains smoking out from under them 
and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to 
i8 



Lady Stair's Close, I.awnmarket. 



Introductory 

brighter skies. Happy the passengers who 
shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have 
heard for the last time the cry of the east 
wind among her chimney-tops ! And yet the 
place establishes an interest in people's hearts ; 
go where they will, they hnd no city of the 
same distinction ; go where they will, they 
take a pride in their old home. 

Venice, it has been said, differs from all 
other cities in the sentiment which she inspires. 
The rest may have admirers ; she only, a 
famous fiir one, counts lovers in her train. 
And, indeed, even by her kindest friends, 
Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. 
These like her for many reasons, not any one 
of which is satisfactory in itself They like 
her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as 
a virtuoso dotes upon his cabinet. Her attrac- 
tion is romantic in the narrowest meaning of 
the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so 
much beautiful as interesting. She is pre- 
eminently Gothic, and all the more so since 



21 



Introductory 

she has set herself off with some Greek airs, 
and erected classic temples on her crags. In 
a word, and above all, she is a curiosity. The 
Palace of Holyrood has been left aside in the 
growth of Edinburgh, and stands grey and 
silent in a workman's quarter and among 
breweries and gas works. It is a house of 
many memories. Great people of yore, kings 
and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors, 
played their stately farce for centuries in 
Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing 
has lasted deep into the night, murder has 
been done in its chambers. There Prince 
Charlie held his phantom levees, and in a very 
gallant manner represented a fallen dynasty for 
some hours. Now, all these things of clay are 
mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself 
is shown for sixpence to the vulgar ; but the 
stone palace has outlived these changes. For 
fifty weeks together, it is no more than a 
show for tourists and a museum of old furni- 
ture ; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace 



Introductory 

reawakened and mimicking its past. The 
Lord Commissioner, a kind of state sovereign, 
sits among stage courtiers ; a coach and six 
and clattering escort come and go before the 
gate ; at night, the windows are lighted up, 
and its near neighbours, the workmen, may 
dance in their own houses to the palace music. 
And in this the palace is typical. There is a 
spark among the embers ; from time to time 
the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but 
partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her 
metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and 
half a country town, the whole city leads a 
double existence ; it has long trances of the 
one and flashes of the other ; like the king of 
the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a 
monumental marble. There are armed men 
and cannon in the citadel overhead ; you may 
see the troops marshalled on the high parade ; 
and at night after the early winter even-fall, 
and in the morning before the laggard winter 
dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh 

23 



Introductory 

the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges 
sit bewigged in what was once the scene of 
imperial deHberations. Close by in the High 
Street perhaps the trumpets may sound about 
the stroke of noon ; and you see a troop of 
citizens in tawdry masquerade ; tabard above, 
heather-mixture trouser below, and the men 
themselves trudging in the mud among unsym- 
pathetic bystanders. The grooms of a well- 
appointed circus tread the streets with a better 
presence. And yet these are the Heralds and 
Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to 
proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom 
before two - score boys, and thieves, and 
hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the 
bell of the University rings out over the hum 
of the streets, and every hour a double tide of 
students, coming and going, rills the deep 
archways. And lastly, one night in the spring- 
time — or say one morning rather, at the peep 
of day — late folk may hear the voices of many 
men singing a psalm in unison from a church 
24 



Introductory 

on one side of the old High Street ; and a 
httle after, or perhaps a Httle before, the sound 
of many men singing a psalm in unison from 
another church on the opposite side of the 
way. There will be something in the words 
about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it 
is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. 
And the late folk will tell themselves that all 
this singing denotes the conclusion of two 
yearly ecclesiastical parliaments — the parliaments 
of Churches which are brothers in many ad- 
mirable virtues, but not specially like brothers 
in this particular of a tolerant and peaceful 
life. 

Again, meditative people will find a charm 
in a certain consonancy between the aspect of 
the city and its odd and stirring history. Few 
places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of 
contrasts to the eye. In the very midst stands 
one of the most satisfactory crags in nature — 
a Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden 
shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown of 

25 



Introductory 

battlements and turrets, and describing its war- 
like shadow over the liveliest and brightest 
thoroughfare of the New Town. From their 
smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed 
look down upon the open squares and gardens 
of the wealthy ; and gay people sunning 
themselves along Princes Street, with its mile 
of commercial palaces all beflagged upon some 
great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set 
with statues, where the washings of the Old 
Town flutter in the breeze at its high windows. 
And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of 
architecture ! In this one valley, where the 
life of the town goes most busily forward, there 
may be seen, shown one above and behind 
another by the accidents of the ground, build- 
ings in almost every style upon the globe. 
Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces 
and Gothic spires, are huddled one over another 
in a most admired disorder ; while, above all, 
the brute mass of the Castle and the summit 
of Arthur's Seat look down upon these imita- 
26 



Introductory 

tions with a becoming dignity, as the works 
of Nature may look down upon the monu- 
ments of Art. But nature is a more indis- 
criminate patroness than we imagine, and in 
no way frightened of a strong effect. The 
birds roost as wilHngly among the Corinthian 
capitals as in the crannies of the crag ; the 
same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eternal 
rock and yesterday's imitation portico ; and as 
the soft northern sunshine throws out every- 
thing into a glorified distinctness — or easterly 
mists, coming up with, the blue evening, fiise 
all these incongruous features into one, and 
the lamps begin to glitter along the street, 
and faint lights to burn in the high windows 
across the valley — the feeling grows upon you 
that this also is a piece of nature in the most 
intimate sense ; that this profusion of eccen- 
tricities, this dream in masonry and living 
rock, is not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a 
city in the world of everyday reality, connected 
by railway and telegraph-wire with all the 

27 



Introductory 

capitals of Europe, and inhabited by citizens 
of the famiHar type, who keep ledgers, and 
attend church, and have sold their immortal 
portion to a daily paper. By all the canons 
of romance, the place demands to be half 
deserted and leaning towards decay ; birds we 
might admit in profusion, the play of the sun 
and winds, and a few gipsies encamped in the 
chief thoroughfare ; but these citizens, with 
their cabs and tramways, their trains and 
posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered 
tourists, they make free with historic localities, 
and rear their young among the most pic- 
turesque sites with a grand human indifference. 
To see them thronging by, in their neat clothes 
and conscious moral rectitude, and with a little 
air of possession that verges on the absurd, is 
not the least striking feature of the place. ^ 

* These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town, 
and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess the 
news caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm 
for wounded fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my 
accusations ? Small blame to them if they keep ledgers : 'tis an 
28 



QucTii Mary's Bath House, Holyrood. 



Introductory 

And the story of the town is as eccentric 
as its appearance. For centuries it was a 
capital thatched with heather, and more than 
once, in the evil days of English invasion, it 
has gone up in flame to heaven, a beacon to 
ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of 
jealous nobles, not only on Greenside, or by 
the King's Stables, where set tournaments were 
fought to the sound of trumpets and under 
the authority of the royal presence, but in 
every alley where there was room to cross 
swords, and in the main street, where popular 
tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated with 
the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. 

excellent business habit. Churchgoing is not, that ever I heard, a 
subject of reproach ; decency of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, 
and conscious moral rectitude one of the tokens of good living. It is 
not their fault if the city calls for something more specious by way of 
inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or 
Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a 
Bcntham. And let them console themselves — they do as well as any- 
body else ; the population of (let us say) Chicago would cut quite as 
rueful a figure on the same romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I 
would say only one word, but that is of gold : / have not yet written a 
hook about G/asgow. 

D 31 



Introductory 

Down in the palace John Knox reproved his 
queen in the accents of modern democracy. 
In the town, in one "of those Httle shops 
plastered like so many swallows' nests among 
the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar 
autocrat, James vi., would gladly share a bottle 
of wine with George Heriot the goldsmith. 
Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look 
down on the Castle with the city lying in 
waves around it, those mad and dismal fanatics, 
the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure 
on the moors, sat day and night with ' tearful 
psalms ' to see Edinburgh consumed with fire 
from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah. 
There, in the Grassmarket, stifF-necked, cove- 
nanting heroes offered up the often unneces- 
sary, but not less honourable, sacrifice of their 
lives, and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, 
and stars, and earthly friendships, or died silent 
to the roll of drums. Down by yon outlet 
rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty 
dragoons, with the town beating to arms 
32 



Introductory 

behind their horses' tails — a sorry handful thus 
riding for their lives, but with a man at the 
head who was to return in a different temper, 
make a dash that staggered Scotland to the 
heart, and die happily in the thick of fight. 
There Aikenhead was hanged for a piece of 
boyish incredulity ; there, a few years after- 
wards, David Hume ruined Philosophy and 
Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen ; 
and thither, in yet a few years more. Burns 
came from the plough-tail, as to an academy 
of gilt unbelief and artificial letters. There, 
when the great exodus was made across the 
valley, and the New Town began to spread 
abroad its draughty parallelograms, and rear its 
long frontage on the opposing hill, there was 
such a flitting, such a change of domicile and 
dweller, as was never excelled in the history 
of cities : the cobbler succeeded the earl ; the 
beggar ensconced himself by the judge's chim- 
ney ; what had been a palace was used as a 
pauper refuge ; and great mansions were so 

33 



Introductory 

parcelled out among the least and lowest 
in society, that the hearthstone of the old 
proprietor was thought large enough to be 
partitioned off into a bedroom by the 



new. 



34 



OLD TOWN 



CHAPTER II 

OLD TOWN : THE LANDS 

THE Old Town, it is pretended, is the 
chief characteristic, and, from a 
picturesque point of view, the Hver- 
wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the most 
common forms of depreciation to throw cold 
water on the whole by adroit over-commenda- 
tion of a part, since everything worth judging, 
whether it be a man, a work of art, or only 
a fine city, must be judged upon its merits as 
a whole. The Old Town depends for much 
of its effect on the new quarters that lie 
around it, on the sufficiency of its situation, 
and on the hills that back it up. If you were 
to set it somewhere else by itself, it would 
look remarkably like Stirling in a bolder and 
loftier edition. The point is to see this 

Z7 



OLI Town 

cnilKllislutl Slirliiig planted in the midst of a 
larj'v, ;u live, and lanlastie modern eity ; lor 
tlKTe llie (wo reael in a pictnresque sense, 
and (lie one is (he making ol the other. 

'The Old Town oeeupies a sloping ridge 
or (ail ol tlihnial ma((er, protected, in some 
suhsidiiue ol the waters, hy the Castle elites 
vvhieh lortily it to (he west. On the one 
siile ol it and the other the new towns ol the 
south anil ol (he nordi oeeupy their lower, 
hroailer, ami m()re gentle hill-tops. Thus, 
the tpiarter ol the ('astle overtops the whole 
(.ity ami kieps an open view to sea and laml. 
it tlominates lor miles on every side ; and 
people on the tieiks ol ships, or ploughing 
in ipiiet eountr\ phues over in File, ean see 
the banner on (he Castle battlements, and the 
smoke ol the OKI ['own Mowing abroad over 
the subjaeent et>untrv. A eity that is set 
ujnin a hill. It was, 1 suppose, Irom this 
distant aspeet that she gi)t her niekname ot 
u'lu/i/ Ri\-kii\ Perhaps it was given her by 



^\ 




J.iim-: 



Olil Town 

|>c*()plc who liail never ( rosscd her doors : 
tlay after day, from tlicir various rustic Pis^>;ahs, 
tl)cy had seen (he pile ol hiiilchii}'^ on the hill 
top, and till- loiij'^ phnnc ol sinoki- ovci (he 
plain; so il .ipptMiid to (Ik in; so il had 
iip|)iMri'd to then l.illuis (illini' thf same held ; 
and as that was all they knew ol (hi- plai r, it 
loidd he all expressed in tlu'se two words, 

liuKi'd, even on a ncaici view, (he Old 
'I'own is propi-rly smoked ; and (honjdi it is 
well washed with rain all (In- year round, i( 
has a grim and soo(y aspec ( amon|'_ its yonnju-r 
sid)url)s. It [Mivv, undii" the law that re^Milates 
the growth ol walled (ities in precarious situa- 
tions, not m cxlciil, hut m hcij'hl and density. 
l^ihlic l)uildinj',s were loried, wherever there 
was room for them, into the midst ol thoroujdi 
fares ; thoroughlares were diminished into 
lanes ; houses sprang up story al(ci story, 
neighhour mountings upon neigJd)om's shoidder, 
as in somi- I'.l k k ll(»le ol (;al(u((a, un(il (li<- 
population slept louKcen or Idlcen deep in a 

1 . 4 1 



Old Town 

vertical direction. The tallest of these lands^ 
as they are locally termed, have long since 
been burnt out ; but to this day it is not 
uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a 
flight ; and the clifl^ of building which hangs 
imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put 
many natural precipices to shame. The cellars 
are already high above the gazer's head, planted 
on the steep hillside ; as for the garret, all 
the furniture may be in the pawn-shop, but it 
commands a famous prospect to the Highland 
hills. The poor man may roost up there in 
the centre of Edinburgh, and yet have a peep 
of the green country from his window ; he 
shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms 
underneath, with their broad squares and 
gardens ; he shall have nothing overhead but 
a few spires, the stone top-gallants of the city ; 
and perhaps the wind may reach him with a 
rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, 
or of flowering lilacs in the spring. 

It is almost the correct literary sentiment 

42 



Old Town 

to deplore the revolutionary improvements of 
Mr. Chambers and his following. It is easy 
to be a conservator of the discomforts of 
others ; indeed, it is only our good qualities 
we find it irksome to conserve. Assuredly, 
in driving streets through the black labyrinth, 
a few curious old corners have been swept 
away, and some associations turned out of 
house and home. But what slices of sunlight, 
what breaths ot clean air, have been let in ! 
And what a picturesque world remains un- 
touched ! You go under dark arches, and 
down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so 
narrow that you can lay a hand on either 
wall ; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, 
the pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. 
Washing dangles above washing from the 
windows ; the houses bulge outwards upon 
flimsy brackets ; you see a bit of sculpture in 
a dark corner ; at the top of all, a gable and 
a few crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, 
you come into a court where the children are 

43 



Old Town 

at play and the grown people sit upon their 
doorsteps, and perhaps a church spire shows 
itself above the roofs. Here, in the narrowest 
of the entry, you find a great old mansion 
still erect, with some insignia of its former 
state — some scutcheon, some holy or courageous 
motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary 
points out where famous and well-born people 
had their lodging ; and as you look up, out 
pops the head of a slatternly woman from the 
countess's window. The Bedouins camp within 
Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship 
is given over to the rats. We are already a 
far way from the days when powdered heads 
were plentiRil in these alleys, with jolly, port- 
wine faces underneath. Even in the chief 
thoroughfares Irish washings flutter at the 
windows, and the pavements are encumbered 
with loiterers. 

These loiterers are a true character of the 
scene. Some shrewd Scotch workmen may 
have paused on their way to a job, debating 

44 



Old Town 

Church affairs and poHtics with their tools 
upon their arm. But the most part are of a 
different order — skulking jail-birds ; unkempt, 
bare - foot children ; big - mouthed, robust 
women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel 
petticoat and short tartan shawl ; among these, 
a few supervising constables and a dismal 
sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from 
higher ranks in society, with some mark of 
better days upon them, like a brand. In a 
place no larger than Edinburgh, and where 
the traffic is mostly centred in five or six 
chief streets, the same face comes often under 
the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from 
this point of view, Edinburgh is not so much 
a small city as the largest of small towns. It 
is scarce possible to avoid observing your 
neighbours ; and I never yet heard of any one 
who tried. It has been my fortune, in this 
anonymous accidental way, to watch more than 
one of these downward travellers for some 
stages on the road to ruin. One man must 

45 



Old Town 

have been upwards of sixty before I first 
observed him, and he made then a decent, 
personable figure in broadcloth of the best. 
For three years he kept falling — grease coming 
and buttons going from the square-skirted 
coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the 
shoulders growing bowed, the hair falling scant 
and grey upon his head ; and the last that 
ever I saw of him, he was standing at the 
mouth of an entry with several men in mole- 
skin, three parts drunk, and his old black 
raiment daubed with mud. I fancy that I still 
can hear him laugh. There was something 
heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so 
advanced an age ; you would have thought a 
man of sixty out of the reach of these calami- 
ties ; you would have thought that he was 
niched by that time into a safe place in life, 
whence he could pass quietly and honourably 
into the grave. 

One of the earliest marks of these degrin- 
golades is, that the victim begins to disappear 

46 



Old Town 

from the New Town thoroughfiires, and takes 
to the High Street, Hke a wounded animal to 
the woods. And such an one is the type of 
the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A 
scutcheon over the door somewhat jars in 
sentiment where there is a washing at every 
window. The old man, when I saw him last, 
wore the coat in which he had played the 
gentleman three years before ; and that was 
just what gave him so pre-eminent an air of 
wretchedness. 

It is true that the over-population was at 
least as dense in the epoch of lords and 
ladies, and that now-a-days some customs 
which made Edinburgh notorious of yore have 
been fortunately pretermitted. But an aggre- 
gation of comfort is not distasteful like an 
aggregation of the reverse. Nobody cares 
how many lords and ladies, and divines and 
lawyers, may have been crowded into these 
houses in the past — perhaps the more the 
merrier. The glasses clink around the china 

47 



The Lands 

punch-bowl, some one touches the virginals, 
there are peacocks' feathers on the chimney, 
and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red 
firelight. That is not an ugly picture in itself, 
nor will it become ugly upon repetition. All 
the better if the like were going on in every 
second room ; the land would only look the 
more inviting. Times are changed. In one 
house, perhaps two-score families herd together; 
and, perhaps, not one of them is wholly out 
of the reach of want. The great hotel is 
given over to discomfort from the foundation 
to the chimney-tops ; everywhere a pinching, 
narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of 
sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there 
is a birth, in another a death, in a third a 
sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and 
the Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High 
words are audible from dwelling to dwelling, 
and children have a strange experience from 
the first ; only a robust soul, you would 
think, could grow up in such conditions 
48 



Cardinal Beaton's House, formerly in tlic 
Cowgate. 









i 



^/ 



7 



The Lands 

without hurt. And even if God tempers His 
dispensations to the young, and all the ill docs 
not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, 
the sight of such a way of living is disquieting 
to people who are more happily circumstanced. 
Social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious 
than at Edinburgh. I have mentioned already 
how, to the stroller along Princes Street, the 
High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. 
It is true, there is a garden between. And 
although nothing could be more glaring by 
way of contrast, sometimes the opposition is 
more immediate ; sometimes the thing lies in 
a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade 
of grass between the rich and poor. To look 
over the South Bridge and see the Cowgate 
below full of crying hawkers, is to view one 
rank of society from another in the twinkling 
of an eye. 

One night I went along the Cowgate after 
every one was abed but the policeman, and 
stopped by hazard before a tall la?i(l. The 

^ 51 



Tl'he Lands 

moon touched upon its chimneys, and shone 
blankly on the upper windows ; there was no 
light anywhere in the great bulk of building ; 
but as I stood there it seemed to me that I 
could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from 
the interior ; doubtless there were many clocks 
ticking, and people snoring on their backs. 
And thus, as I fincied, the dense life within 
made itself faintly audible in my ears, family 
after fmiily contributing its quota to the general 
hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to 
its time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. 
Perhaps it was little more than a fancy alto- 
gether, but it was strangely impressive at the 
time, and gave me an imaginative measure of 
tlie disproportion between the quantity of living 
rtcsh and the trifling walls that separated and 
contained it. 

There was nothing £inciful, at least, but 
every circumstance of terror and reality, in the 
fall of the land in the High Street. The 
building had grown rotten to the core ; the 

52 



The Lancfs 

entry underneath had suddenly closed up so 
that the scavenger's barrow could not pass ; 
cracks and reverberations sounded through the 
house at night ; the inhabitants of the huge 
old human bee-hive discussed their peril when 
they encountered on the stair ; some had even 
left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and 
returned to them again in a fit of economy 
or self-respect ; when, in the black hours of a 
Sunday morning, the whole structure ran to- 
gether with a hideous uproar and tumbled 
story upon story to the ground. The physical 
shock was felt far and near ; and the moral 
shock travelled with the morning milkmaid 
into all the suburbs. The church-bells never 
sounded more dismally over Edinburgh than 
that grey forenoon. Death had made a brave 
harvest, and, like Samson, by pulling down 
one roof, destroyed many a home. None who 
saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the 
gable ; here it was plastered, there papered, 
according to the rooms ; here the kettle still 

53 



The Lands 

stood on the hob, high overhead ; and there 
a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted over 
the chimney. So, by this disaster, you had a 
ghmpsc into tlie hfe of thirty famiHes, all 
suddenly cut off from the revolving years. 
The lafid Jiad filien ; and with the land how 
much ! Far in the country, people saw a 
gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked 
through between the chimneys in an unwonted 
place. And all over the world, in London, 
in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a 
multitude of people could exclaim with truth : 
' I'he house that I was born in fell last 
niirht ! ' 



54 



THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 



CHAPTER III 

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 

TIME has wrought its changes most 
notably around the precinct of St. 
Giles's Church. The church itself, 
if it were not for the spire, would be unre- 
cognisable ; the Krames are all gone, not a 
shop is left to shelter in its buttresses ; and 
zealous magistrates and a misguided architect 
have shorn the design of manhood, and left it 
poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious. As St. 
Giles's must have had in former days a rich 
and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the 
neighbourhood was bustling, sunless, and 
romantic. It was here that the town was most 
overbuilt ; but the overbuilding has been all 
rooted out, and not only a free fair-way left 
along the High Street with an open space on 

57 



The T^arliament Close 

either side of the ehurch, but a great porthole, 
knocked in the main Hne of the la7ids^ gives 
an outlook to the north and the New Town. 

There is a silly story of a subterranean 
passage between the Castle and Holy rood, and 
a bold Highland piper who volunteered to 
explore its windings. He made his entrance 
by the upper end, playing a strathspey ; the 
curious footed it after him down the street, 
following his descent by the sound of the 
chanter from below : until all of a sudden, 
about the level of St. Giles's, the music came 
abruptly to an end, and the people in the 
street stood at fault with hands uplifted. 
Whether he was choked with gases, or perished 
in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil 
One, remains a point of doubt ; but the piper 
has never again been seen or heard of from 
that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down 
into the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and 
some day, when it is least expected, may take 
a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. 

5« 



e'athcJnil ot" St. C.ik 
m the early p; 



hist Ccnturw 



71^6' T^arliament Close 

That will be a strange moment for the cabmen 
on the stance beside St. Giles's, when they 
hear the drone of his pipes reascending from 
the bowels of the earth below their horses' 
feet. 

But it is not only pipers who have vanished ; 
many a solid bulk of masonry has been like- 
wise spirited into the air. Here, for example, 
is the shape of a heart let into the causeway. 
This was the site of the Tolbooth, the Heart 
of Midlothian, a place old in story and name- 
father to a noble book. The walls are now 
down in the dust ; there is no more squalor 
carccris for merry debtors, no more cage for 
the old, acknowledged prison-breaker ; but the 
sun and the wind play freely over the founda- 
tions of the jail. Nor is this the only memo- 
rial that the pavement keeps of former days. 
The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh lay 
behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill 
to the Cowgate and covering the site of the 
present Parliament House. It has disappeared 

G 6i 



I'he T^arliament Close 

as utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths ; 
and for those ignorant of its history, I know 
only one token that remains. In the Par- 
liament Close, trodden daily underfoot by 
advocates, two letters and a date mark the 
resting-place of the man who made Scotland 
over again in his own image, the indefatigable, 
undissuadable John Knox. He sleeps within 
call of the church that so often echoed to his 
preaching. 

Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and 
garlanded Charles Second, made of lead, be- 
strides a tun-bellied charger. The King has 
his back turned, and, as you look, seems to be 
trotting clumsily away from such a dangerous 
neighbour. Often, for hours together, these 
two will be alone in the Close, for it lies out 
of the way of all but legal traffic. On one 
side the south wall of the church, on the other 
the arcades of tlie Parliament House, enclose 
this irregular bight of causeway and describe 
their shadows on it in the sun. At either 

62 



The T^arliament Close 

end, from round St. Giles's buttresses, you 
command a look into the High Street with 
its motley passengers ; but the stream goes by, 
east and west, and leaves the Parliament Close 
to Charles the Second and the birds. Once 
in a while, a patient crowd may be seen loiter- 
ing there all day, some eating fruit, some 
reading a newspaper ; and to judge by their 
quiet demeanour, you would think they were 
waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. The 
fact is fir otherwise ; within in the Justiciary 
Court a man is upon trial for his life, and 
these are some of the curious for whom the 
gallery was found too narrow. Towards after- 
noon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there will 
be a round of hisses when he is brought forth. 
Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and 
gown, hand upon mouth, full of pregnant 
nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening 
to an agent ; and at certain regular hours a 
whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space. 
The Parliament Close has been the scene 

63 



I'he T^arliament Close 

of marking incidents in Scottish history. Thus, 
when the Bishops were ejected from the Con- 
vention in 1688, *all fourteen of them gathered 
together with pale faces and stood in a cloud 
in the Parliament Close ' ; poor episcopal 
personages who were done with fair weather 
for life ! Some of the west-country Societarians 
standing by, who would have ' rejoiced more 
than in great sums' to be at their hanging, 
hustled them so rudely that they knocked their 
heads together. It was not magnanimous 
behaviour to dethroned enemies ; but one, at 
least, of the Societarians had groaned in the 
boots^ and they had all seen their dear friends 
upon the scaffold. Again, at the ' woeful 
Union,' it was here that people crowded to 
escort their favourite from the last of Scottish 
parliaments : people flushed with nationality, 
as Boswell would have said, ready for riotous 
acts, and fresh from throwing stones at the 
author of RobtJison Crusoe as he looked out 
of window. 
64 



T'hc T^arliament Close 

One of the pious in the seventeenth century, 
going to pass his trials (examinations as we 
now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the 
Parhament Close open and had a vision of the 
mouth of Hell. This, and small wonder, was 
the means of his conversion. Nor was the 
vision unsuitable to the locality ; for after an 
hospital, what uglier piece is there in civilisa- 
tion than a court of law ? Hither come envy, 
malice, and all uncharitableness to wrestle it 
out in public tourney ; crimes, broken fortunes, 
severed households, the knave and his victim, 
gravitate to this low building with the arcade. 
To how many has not St. Giles's bell told the 
first hour after ruin ? I think I see them 
pause to count the strokes, and wander on 
again into the moving High Street, stunned 
and sick at heart. 

A pair of swing doors gives admittance to 
a hall with a carved roof, hung with legal 
portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted 
by windows of painted glass, and warmed by 

65 



T^he T^arliament Close 

three vast fires. This is the Salle cles pas 
perdus of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a fero- 
cious custom, idle youths must promenade 
from ten till two. From end to end, singly 
or in pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go 
back and forward. Through a hum of talk 
and footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer 
announce a fresh cause and call upon the 
names of those concerned. Intelligent men 
have been walking here daily for ten or twenty 
years without a rag of business or a shilling of 
reward. In process of time, they may perhaps 
be made the Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of 
Justice at Lerwick or Tobermory. There is 
nothing required, you would say, but a little 
patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. 
To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the 
mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts 
of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long 
with indescribable longings for the hour when 
a man may slip out of his travesty and devote 
himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, 
66 



The Tarliament Close 

and to do this day by day and year after year, 
may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced ! 
But those who have made the experiment are 
of a different way of thinking, and count it 
the most arduous form of idleness. 

More swing doors open into pigeon-holes 
where Judges of the First Appeal sit singly, 
and halls of audience where the supreme Lords 
sit by three or four. Here, you may see 
Scott's place within the bar, where he wrote 
many a page of Waverley novels to the drone 
of judicial proceeding. You will hear a good 
deal of shrewdness, and, as their Lordships do 
not altogether disdain pleasantry, a fair pro- 
portion of dry fun. The broadest of broad 
Scotch is now banished from the bench ; but 
the courts still retain a certain national flavour. 
We have a solemn enjoyable way of lingering 
on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and 
relish and digest a good distinction. There is 
no hurry : point after point must be rightly 
examined and reduced to principle ; judge 

67 



The T^arliament Close 

after judge must utter forth his obiter dicta to 
deHghted brethren. 

Besides the courts, there are installed under 
the same roof no less than three libraries : two 
of no mean order ; confused and semi-sub- 
terranean, full of stairs and galleries ; where 
you may see the most studious-looking wigs 
fishing out novels by lanthorn light, in the 
very place where the old Privy Council tortured 
Covenanters. As the Parliament House is built 
upon a slope, although it presents only one 
story to the north, it measures half a dozen at 
least upon the south ; and range after range 
of vaults extend below the libraries. Few 
places are more characteristic of this hilly 
capital. You descend one stone stair after 
another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, 
in a labyrinth of stone cellars. Now, you pass 
below the Outer Hall and hear overhead, brisk 
but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal 
feet. Now, you come upon a strong door with 
a wicket : on the other side are the cells of 

68 



The 



Caiioiigatc Tol booth. 






■m 



I'f'i! 



.^TT'L 



«i^ 



OT <W, 



H- 



The Tarliaynent Close 

the police office and the trap-stair that gives 
admittance to the dock in the Justiciary Court. 
Many a foot that has gone up there lightly 
enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. 
Many a man's life has been argued away from 
him during long hours in the court above. 
But just now that tragic stage is empty and 
silent like a church on a week-day, with the 
bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but 
the sunbeams on the wall. A little firther 
and you strike upon a room, not empty like 
the rest, but crowded with procluctio7is from 
bygone criminal cases : a grim lumber : lethal 
weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door with 
a shot-hole through the panel, behind which a 
man fell dead. I cannot fancy why they should 
preserve them, unless it were against the Judg- 
ment Day. At length, as you continue to 
descend, you see a peep of yellow gaslight 
and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead ; 
next moment you turn a corner, and there, in 
a whitewashed passage, is a machinery belt 

7^ 



'The T*arliament Close 

industriously turning on its wheels. You 
would think the engine had grown there of 
its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and would 
soon spin itself out and fill the vaults from end 
to end with its mysterious labours. In truth, 
it is only some gear of the steam ventilator ; 
and you will find the engineers at hand, and 
may step out of their door into the sunlight. 
For all this while^ you have not been descend- 
ing towards the earth's centre, but only to the 
bottom of the hill and the foundations of the 
Parliament House ; low down, to be sure, but 
still under the open heaven and in a field of 
grass. The daylight shines garishly on the 
back windows of the Irish quarter ; on broken 
shutters, wry gables, old palsied houses on the 
brink of ruin, a crumbling human pigsty fit for 
human pigs. There are few signs of life, be- 
sides a scanty washing or a face at a window : 
the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at 
night and stagger to their pallets. 



72 



LEGENDS 



CHAPTER IV 

LEGENDS 

THE character of a place is often most 
perfectly expressed in its associations. 
An event strikes root and grows into a 
legend, when it has happened amongst congenial 
surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly 
places, have the true romantic quality, and be- 
come an undying property of their scene. To 
a man like Scott, the different appearances of 
nature seemed each to contain its own legend 
ready made, which it was his to call forth : in 
such or such a place, only such or such events 
ought with propriety to happen ; and in this 
spirit he made the Lady of the Lake for Ben 
Venue, the Heart of Midiot/iian for Edinburgh, 
and the Pirate^ so indifferently written but so ro- 
mantically conceived, for the desolate islands and 

75 



Legends 

roaring tideways of the North. The common 
run of mankind have, from generation to genera- 
tion, an instinct almost as deHcate as that of 
Scott ; but where he created new things, they 
only forget what is unsuitable among the old ; 
and by survival of the fittest, a body of tradition 
becomes a work of art. So in the low dens and 
high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go 
back upon dark passages in the town's adven- 
tures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales 
about the fire : tales that are singularly apposite 
and characteristic, not only of the old life, but of 
the very constitution of built nature in that part, 
and singularly well qualified to add horror to 
horror, when the wind pipes around the tall 
lands^ and hoots adown arched passages, and the 
far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quaver- 
ing and flaring in the gusts. 

Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, 
stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his 
blood within a step or two of the crowded High 
Street. There, people hush their voices over 

76 



Legends 

Burke and Hare ; over drugs and violated graves, 
and the resurrection-men smothering their vic- 
tims with their knees. Here, again, the fame of 
Deacon Brodie is kept piously fresh. A great 
man in his day was the Deacon ; well seen in 
good society, crafty with his hands as a cabinet- 
maker, and one who could sing a song with 
taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome 
the Deacon to supper, and dismissed him with 
regret at a timeous hour, who would have been 
vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and 
in what guise, his visitor returned. Many stories 
are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh burglar, 
but the one I have in my mind most vividly 
gives the key of all the rest. A friend of Brodie's, 
nested some way towards heaven in one of these 
great /a?tcis^ had told him of a projected visit to 
the country, and afterwards, detained by some 
affairs, put it off^ and stayed the night in town. 
The good man had lain some time awake ; it 
was far on in the small hours by the Tron bell ; 
when suddenly there came a creak, a jar, a faint 

77 



Lc(ycri(h 

o 

light. Soltly he clambered out of bed and up to 
a false wiinlovv vvhieh looked upon another room, 
and there, by the glimmer of a thieves' lantern, 
was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. It is 
characteristic of the town and the town's manners 
that this little episode should have been quietly 
tided over, and quite a good time elapsed before 
a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street rminer, 
a cock-hght, an apprehension in a cupboard in 
Amsterdam, and a last step into the air oft his 
own greatly improved gallows drop, brought the 
career of Dcac(Hi William Brodie to an end. 
But still, by the mind's eye, he may be seen, a 
man harassed behnv a mountain of duplicity, 
slinking from a magistrate's supper-room to a 
thieves' ken, and pickeering among the closes by 
the flicker of a dark lamp. 

Or where the Deacon is out of fivour, per- 
haps some memory lingers of the great plagues, 
anil of fital lunises still unsafe to enter within the 
memory ot man. For in time of pestilence the 
discipline had been sharp and sudden, and what 

7« 



Legends 

we now call ' stamping out contagion ' was 
carried on with deadly rigour. The officials, in 
their gowns of grey, with a white St. Andrew's 
cross on back and breast, and white cloth carried 
before them on a staff, perambulated the city, 
adding the terror of man's justice to the fear of 
God's visitation. The dead they buried on the 
Borough Muir ; the living who had concealed 
the sickness were drowned, if they were women, 
in the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were 
hanged and gibbeted at their own doors ; and 
wherever the evil had passed, furniture was 
destroyed and houses closed. And the most 
bogeyish part of the story is about such houses. 
Two generations back they still stood dark and 
empty ; people avoided them as they passed by ; 
the boldest schoolboy only shouted through the 
keyhole and made off ; for within, it was sup- 
posed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, 
ready to flow forth and spread blain and pustule 
through the city. What a terrible next-door 
neighbour for superstitious citizens ! A rat 
I 79 



Legends 

scampering within would send a shudder through 
the stoutest heart. Here, if you Hke, was a 
sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly 
forefathers to their own neglect. 

And then we have Major Weir ; for although 
even his house is now demolished, old Edinburgh 
cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He 
and his sister lived together in an odour of sour 
piety. She was a marvellous spinster ; he had a 
rare gift of supplication, and was known among 
devout admirers by the name of Angelical 
Thomas. * He was a tall, black man, and ordi- 
narily looked down to the ground ; a grim 
countenance, and a big nose. His garb was still 
a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he never went 
without his staff.' How it came about that 
Angelical Thomas was burned in company with 
his staff, and his sister in gentler manner hanged, 
and whether these two were simply religious 
maniacs of the more furious order, or had real 
as well as imaginary sins upon their old-world 
shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach 
80 



Phivh 



C'lost', CaiKingiitc. 



Legenas 

of our intention. At least, it is suitable enough 
that out of this superstitious city some such 
example should have been put forth : the out- 
come and fine flower of dark and vehement 
religion. And at least the facts struck the 
public fancy and brought forth a remarkable 
family of myths. It would appear that the 
Major's stafl^ went upon his errands, and even 
ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. 
Gigantic females, ' stentoriously laughing and 
gaping with tehees of laughter ' at unseasonable 
hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus 
of his abode. His house fell under such a load 
of infamy that no one dared to sleep in it, until 
municipal improvement levelled the structure with 
the ground. And my father has often been told 
in the nursery how the devil's coach, drawn by 
six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive 
at night into the West Bow, and belated people 
might see the dead Major through the glasses. 

Another legend is that of the two maiden 
sisters. A legend I am afraid it may be, in the 

83 



Legends 

most discreditable meaning of the term ; or 
perhaps something worse — a mere yesterday's 
fiction. But it is a story of some vitaHty, and is 
worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. 
This pair inhabited a single room ; from the 
facts, it must have been double-bedded ; and it 
may have been of some dimensions : but when 
all is said, it was a single room. Here our two 
spinsters fell out — on some point of controversial 
divinity belike ; but fell out so bitterly that there 
was never a word spoken between them, black 
or whit'^, from that day forward. You would 
have thought they would separate : but no ; 
whether from lack of means, or the Scottish fear 
of scandal, they continued to keep house to- 
gether where they were. A chalk line drawn 
upon the floor separated their two domains ; it 
bisected the doorway and the fireplace, so that 
each could go out and in, and do her cooking, 
without violating the territory of the other. So, 
for years, they coexisted in a hateful silence ; 
their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, 
84 



Legends 

exposed to an unfriendly scrutiny ; and at night, 
in the dark watches, each could hear the breath- 
ing of her enemy. Never did four walls look 
down upon an uglier spectacle than these sisters 
rivalling in unsisterliness. Here is a canvas for 
Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture 
— he had a Puritanic vein, which would have 
htted him to treat this Puritanic horror ; he 
could have shown them to us in their sicknesses 
and at their hideous twin devotions, thumbing a 
pair of great Bibles, or praying aloud for each 
other's penitence with marrowy emphasis ; now 
each, with kilted petticoat, at her own corner 
of the fire on some tempestuous evening ; now 
sitting each at her window, looking out upon 
the summer landscape sloping far below them 
towards the firth, and the field-paths where they 
had wandered hand in hand ; or, as age and 
infirmity grew upon them and prolonged their 
toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and 
their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only 
the more steeled in enmity with years ; until 

85 



Legends 

one fine d;iy, at a word, a look, a visit, or the 
approach ol titath, ihcir hearts woultl melt and 
the clialk hoiintlary he overstepped lor ever. 

Alas ! to those who know the ecelesiastical 
history ol (he raee — the niost perverse and 
melaiuholy in man's annals — this will seem only 
a figure of miieh that is typieal of Seotland and 
her high-seateil capital ahove the Forth — a figure 
so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers 
for a eariealure. We are wonderful patient 
haters lor eonseiente' sake up here in the North. 
I spoke, in the lust of these papers, of the Par- 
liamenis of the l^stahlished and I'ree Churches, 
and how they can hear each other singing psalms 
across the street. J'herc is hut a street between 
them in space, hut a shadow between them in 
jtrinciplc ; and yet there they sit, enehantcil, 
aiul in tlamnatory accents pray for each other's 
growth in grace. It would be well if there were 
no more than two ; but the sects in Scotlanil 
form a large family of sisters, ami the chalk lines 
are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of 



I If.ui 



ihv West How. 



Legends 

many private homes. Edinburgh is a city of 
churches^ as though it were a place of pilgrimage. 
You will see four within a stone-cast at the head 
of the West Bow. Some are crowded to the 
doors ; some are empty like monuments ; and 
yet you will ever find new ones in the building. 
Hence that surprising clamour of church bells 
that suddenly breaks out upon the Sabbath 
morning from Trinity and the sea-skirts to 
Morningside on the borders of the hills. I have 
heard the chimes of Oxford playing their sym- 
phony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful 
it was to hear. But in Edinburgh all manner of 
loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one swelling, 
brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes 
another, and now lags behind it ; now five or 
six all strike on the pained tympanum at the 
same punctual instant of time, and make together 
a dismal chord of discord ; and now for a second 
all seem to have conspired to hold their peace. 
Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world 
more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells in 

89 



Legends 

Edinburgh : a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin ; the 
outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on 
every separate conventicler to put up a protest, 
each in his own synagogue, against ' right-hand 
extremes and left-hand defections.' And surely 
there are few worse extremes than this extremity 
of zeal ; and few more deplorable defections 
than this disloyalty to Christian love. Shake- 
speare wrote a comedy of * Much Ado about 
Nothing.' The Scottish nation made a fantastic 
tragedy on the same subject. And it is for the 
success of this remarkable piece that these bells 
are sounded every Sabbath morning on the hills 
above the Forth. How many of them might 
rest silent in the steeple, how many of these ugly 
churches might be demolished and turned once 
more into useful building material, if people who 
think almost exactly the same thoughts about 
religion would condescend to worship God under 
the same roof! But there are the chalk lines. 
And which is to pocket pride, and speak the 
foremost word ? 
90 



GREYFRIARS 



CHAPTER V 
GREYFRIARS 

IT was Queen Mary who threw open the 
gardens of the Grey Friars : a new and 
semi-rural cemetery in those days, although 
it has grown an antiquity in its turn and been 
superseded by half a dozen others. The Friars 
must have had a pleasant time on summer even- 
ings ; for their gardens were situated to a wish, 
with the tall castle and the tallest of the castle 
crags in front. Even now, it is one of our 
famous Edinburgh points of view ; and strangers 
are led thither to see, by yet another instance, 
how strangely the city lies upon her hills. The 
enclosure is of an irregular shape ; the double 
church of Old and New Greyfriars stands on the 
level at the top ; a few thorns are dotted here 
and there, and the ground falls by terrace and 

93 



Greyfriars 

steep slope towards the north. The open shows 
many slabs and table tombstones ; and all round 
the margin the place is girt by an array of aris- 
tocratic mausoleums appallingly adorned. 

Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which 
belong to the heroic order of graveyard art, we 
Scots stand, to my fancy, highest among nations 
in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We 
seem to love for their own sake the emblems of 
time and the great change ; and even around 
country churches you will find a wonderful 
exhibition of skulls, and crossbones, and noseless 
angels, and trumpets pealing for the Judgment 
Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein : 
he had a deep consciousness of death, and loved 
to put its terrors pithily before the churchyard 
loiterer ; he was brimful of rough hints upon 
mortality, and any dead farmer was seized upon 
to be a text. The classical examples of this art 
are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were 
doubtless costly monuments, and reckoned of 
a very elegant proportion by contemporaries ; 

94 



Greyfriars 

and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, 
the signihcance remains. You may perhaps 
look with a smile on the profusion of Latin 
mottoes — some crawling endwise up the shaft: 
of a pillar, some issuing on a scroll from angels' 
trumpets — on the emblematic horrors, the 
figures rising headless from the grave, and all 
the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased 
our fethers to set forth their sorrow for the dead 
and their sense of earthly mutability. But it is 
not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may 
have been executed by the merriest apprentice, 
whistling as he plied the mallet ; but the original 
meaning of each, and the combined effect of so 
many of them in this quiet enclosure, is serious 
to the point of melancholy. 

Round a great part of the circuit, houses of 
a low class present their backs to the church- 
yard. Only a few inches separate the living 
from the dead. Here, a window is partly 
blocked up by the pediment of a tomb ; there, 
where the street falls far below the level of the 

95 



Greyfriars 

graves, a chimney has been trained up the back 
of a monument, and a red pot looks vulgarly 
over from behind. A damp smell of the grave- 
yard finds its way into houses where workmen 
sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale goes 
forward visibly at the windows. The very soli- 
tude and stillness of the enclosure, which lies 
apart from the town's traffic, serves to accentuate 
the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, 
you see children scattering crumbs to feed the 
sparrows • you hear people singing or washing 
dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation ; 
the linen on a clothes-pole flaps against funereal 
sculpture ; or perhaps the cat slips over the 
lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And 
as there is nothing else astir, these incongruous 
sights and noises take hold on the attention and 
exaggerate the sadness of the place. 

Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I 
have seen one afternoon, as many as thirteen 
of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, 
the Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and com- 

96 



Greyfriars 

placently blinking, as if they had fed upon 
strange meats. Old Milne was chaunting with 
the saints, as we may hope, and cared little for 
the company about his grave : but I confess the 
spectacle had an ugly side for me ; and I was 
glad to step forward and raise my eyes to where 
the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and 
the spire of the Assembly Hall stood deployed 
against the sky with the colourless precision of 
engraving. An open outlook is to be desired 
from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and 
some of the world's beauty relieves a mind from 
morbid thoughts. 

I shall never forget one visit. It was a 
grey, dropping day ; the grass was strung with 
raindrops ; and the people in the houses kept 
hanging out their shirts and petticoats and 
angrily taking them in again, as the weather 
turned from wet to fair and back again. A 
gravedigger, and a friend of his, a gardener from 
the country, accompanied me into one after 
another of the cells and little courtyards in 

97 



Greyfriars 

which it gratified the wealthy of old days to 
enclose their old bones from neighbourhood. 
In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a 
forlorn human effigy, very realistically executed 
down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and 
holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his 
demise. He looked most pitiful and ridiculous, 
shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct, 
like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity 
under a new dispensation ; the burdocks grew 
familiarly about his feet, the rain dripped all 
round him ; and the world maintained the most 
entire indifference as to who he was or whither 
he had gone. In another, a vaulted tomb, 
handsome externally but horrible inside with 
damp and cobwebs, there were three mounds 
of black earth and an uncovered thigh bone. 
This was the place of interment, it appeared, of 
a family with whom the gardener had been long 
in service. He was among old acquaintances. 
' This '11 be Miss Marg'et's,' said he, giving the 

bone a friendly kick. ' The auld ! ' I 

98 



Greyfriars 

have always an uncomfortable feeling in a grave- 
yard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate 
memories best forgotten ; but I never had the 
impression so strongly as that day. People had 
been at some expense in both these cases : to 
provoke a melancholy feeling of derision in the 
one, and an insulting epithet in the other. The 
proper inscription for the most part of mankind, 
I began to think, is the cynical jeer, eras tibi. 
That, if anything, will stop the mouth of a 
carper ; since it both admits the worst and 
carries the war triumphantly into the enemy's 
camp. 

Greyfriars is a place of many associations. 
There was one window in a house at the lower 
end, now demolished, which was pointed out to 
me by the gravedigger as a spot of legendary 
interest. Burke, the resurrection man, infamous 
for so many murders at five shillings a head, 
used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to 
watch burials going forward on the green. In 
a tomb higher up, which must then have been 

L 99 



Grey friars 

but newly finished, John Knox, according to the 
same informant, had taken refuge in a turmoil 
of the Reformation. Behind the church is the 
haunted mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie : 
Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in the Cove- 
nanting troubles and author of some pleasing 
sentiments on toleration. Here, in the last 
century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once 
harboured from the pursuit of the police. The 
Hospital is next door to Greyfriars — a courtly 
building among lawns, where, on Founder's 
Day, you may see a multitude of children play- 
ing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the Mulberry- 
bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to 
conceal himself in the tomb, his old schoolmates 
had a hundred opportunities to bring him food ; 
and there he lay in safety till a ship was found 
to smuggle him abroad. But his must have 
been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day and 
night alone with the dead persecutor ; and 
other lads were far from emulating him in 
courage. When a man's soul is certainly in 



100 




■| -'^m-M: 



r^ 



0f"t 



C;UKik'iii;ik(.T Row, ( JrcytViii 



k 



Greyfriars 

hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb, 
however costly ; some time or other the door 
must open, and the reprobate come forth in the 
abhorred garments of the grave. It was thought 
a high piece of prowess to knock at the Lord 
Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to 
appear. ' Bluidy Mackenyie, come oot if ye 
daur ! ' sang the foolhardy urchins. But Sir 
George had other affairs on hand ; and the 
author of an essay on toleration continues to 
sleep peacefully among the many whom he so 
intolerantly helped to slay. 

For this i7ifelix campus, as it is dubbed in 
one of its own inscriptions — an inscription over 
which Dr. Johnson passed a critical eye — is in 
many ways sacred to the memory of the men 
whom Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, on 
the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was 
signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long 
arm of the churchyard that extends to Lauriston, 
the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge — fed on 
bread and water and guarded, life for life, by 

103 



Greyfriars 

vigilant marksmen — lay five months looking for 
the scaffold or the plantations. And while the 
good work was going forward in the Grass- 
market, idlers in Greyfriars might have heard 
the throb of the military drums that drowned 
the voices of the martyrs. Nor is this all : for 
down in the corner farthest from Sir George 
there stands a monument dedicated, in uncouth 
Covenanting verse, to all who lost their lives in 
that contention. There is no moorsman shot 
in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co'monell ; 
there is not one of the two hundred who were 
drowned off the Orkneys \ nor so much as a 
poor, over-driven. Covenanting slave in the 
American plantations ; but can lay claim to a 
share in that memorial, and, if such things 
interest just men among the shades, can boast 
he has a monument on earth as well as Julius 
Caesar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all 
lie, I know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed ! 
But if the reader cares to learn how some of 
them — or some part of some of them — found 
104 



Greyfriars 

their way at length to such honourable sepulture, 
let him listen to the words of one who was their 
comrade in life and their apologist when they 
were dead. Some of the insane controversial 
matter I omit, as well as some digressions, but 
leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language and 
orthography : — 

' The never to be forgotten Mr. James Renwick told 
me, that he was Witness to their Public Murder at the 
Gallowlee, between Leith and Edinburgh, when he saw the 
Hangman hash and hagg off all their Five Heads, with 
Patrick Foreman's Right Hand : Their Bodies were all 
buried at the Gallows Foot ; their Heads, with Patrick's 
Hand, were brought and put upon five pikes on the 
Pieasaunce-Port. ... Mr. Renwick told me also that it 
was the first public Action that his Hand was at, to 
conveen Friends, and lift their murthered Bodies, and 

carried them to the West Churchyard of Edinburgh,' 

not Greyfriars, this time,— ' and buried them there. 
Then they came about the City ... and took down 
these Five Heads and that Hand ; and Day being come, 
they went quickly up the P/easaunce ; and when they 
came to Lauristoun Yards, upon the South-side of the 
City, they durst not venture, being so light, to go and 
bury their Heads with their Bodies, which they designed ; 
it being present Death, if any of them had been found! 



Greyfr 



riars 

Alexander Tweedie, a Friend, being with them, who at 
that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to 
bury them in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in 
Linen), where they lay 45 Years except 3 Days, being 
executed upon the loth of October 1681, and found the 
7th Day of October 1726. That Piece of Ground lay for 
some Years unlaboured ; and trenching it, the Gardner 
found them, which affrighted him ; the Box was con- 
sumed. Mr. Schaw, the Owner of these Yards, caused 
lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his Summer- 
house : Mr. Schawls mother was so kind, as to cut out a 
Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay Twelve Days 
there, where all had Access to see them. Alexander 
Tweedie, the foresaid Gardner, said, when dying, There 
was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither Gold nor 
Silver. Daniel Tweedie, his Son, came along with me to 
that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white 
Rose-bush above them, and farther down the Yard a red 
Rose-bush, which were more fruitful than any other 
Bush in the Yard. . . . Many came ' — to see the heads 
— ' out of Curiosity ; yet I rejoiced to see so many con- 
cerned grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of 
our Martyrs. There were Six of us concluded to bury 
them upon the Nineteenth Day of October 1726, and 
every One of us to acquaint Friends of the Day and 
Hour, being Wednesday, the Day of the Week on which 
most of them were executed, and at 4 of the Clock at 
Night, being the Hour that most of them went to their 
resting Graves. We caused make a compleat Coffin for 
106 



The Foot of Caiiongatt 



OlM 









' 




t^/ 


,^^--^ 


fS 


k ^' ,~- 








/ ., • ....:^ 


mS 



Greyfriars 

them in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen, the way 
that our Martyrs Corps were managed. . . . Accordingly 
we kept the aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the 
Linen, and laid the Half of it below them, their nether 
Jaws being parted from their Heads ; but being young 
Men, their Teeth remained. All were Witness to the 
Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman broke 
with his Hammer ; and according to the Bigness of their 
Sculls, we laid the Jaws to them, and drew the other 
Half of the Linen above them, and stufft the Coffin with 
Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the chief Parts 
of the City as was done at the Revolution ; but this we 
refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to 
make such Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid 
serious Observing of such an affecting, surprizing un- 
heard-of Dispensation : But took the ordinary Way of 
other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east the 
Back of the Wall, and in at Bristo-Port, and down the 
Way to the Head of the Cowgate, and turned up to the 
Church-yard, where they were interred closs to the 
Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest Multitude of People 
Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and others, 
that ever I saw together.' 

And so there they were at last, in * their 
resting graves.' So long as men do their duty, 
even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they 
will be leading pattern lives ; and whether or 

109 



Greyfriars 

not they come to lie beside a martyrs' monu- 
ment, we may be sure they will find a safe 
haven somewhere in the providence of God. It 
is not well to think of death, unless we temper 
the thought with that of heroes who despised 
it. Upon what ground, is of small account j 
if it be only the bishop who was burned for his 
faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the 
heart and makes us walk undisturbed among 
graves. And so the martyrs' monument is a 
wholesome, heartsome spot in the field of the 
dead ; and as we look upon it, a brave influence 
comes to us from the land of those who have 
won their discharge and, in another phrase of 
Patrick Walker's, got ' cleanly off the stage.' 



NEW TOWN 



CHAPTER VI 

NEW TOWN : TOWN AND COUNTRY 

IT is as much a matter of course to decry the 
New Town as to exalt the Old ; and the 
most celebrated authorities have picked 
out this quarter as the very emblem of what is 
condemnable in architecture. Much may be 
said, much indeed has been said, upon the text ; 
but to the unsophisticated, who call anything 
pleasing if it only pleases them, the New Town 
of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and 
airy, but highly picturesque. An old skipper, 
invincibly ignorant of all theories of the sublime 
and beautiful, once propounded as his most 
radiant notion for Paradise : * The new town of 
Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a point 
free.' He has now gone to that sphere where 
all good tars are promised pleasant weather in 

JI3 



!J^w 'Town 

the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly some- 
what higher. But there are bright and temperate 
days — with soft air eoming from the inland hills, 
military musie sounding bravely from the hollow 
of the gardens, the flags all waving on the 
palaces of Princes Street — when I have seen the 
town through a sort of glory, and shaken hands 
in sentiment with the old sailor. And indeed, 
for a man who has been much tumbled round 
Orcadian skerries, what scene could be more 
agreeable to witness ? On such a day, the 
valley wears a surprising air of festival. It 
seems (I do not know how else to put my 
meaning) as if it were a trifle too good to be 
true. It is what Paris ought to be. It has 
the scenic quality that would best set off a life 
oi unthinking, open-air diversion. It was meant 
by nature for the realisation of the society of 
comic operas. And you can imagine, if the 
climate were but towardly, how all the world 
and his wife would flock into these gardens in 
the cool of the evening, to hear cheerful music, 
114 



!J^w 'Town 

to sip pleasant drinks, to sec the moon rise from 
behind Arthur's Seat and shine upon the spires 
and monuments and the green tree-tops in the 
valley. Alas I and the next morning the rain 
is splashing on the window, and the passengers 
flee along Princes Street before the galloping 
squalls. 

It cannot be denied that the original design 
was faulty and short-sighted, and did not fully 
proht by the capabilities of the situation. The 
architect was essentially a town bird, and he 
laid out the modern city with a view to street 
scenery, and to street scenery alone. The 
country did not enter into his plan ; he had 
never lifted his eyes to the hills. If he had 
so chosen, every street upon the northern slope 
might have been a noble terrace and com- 
manded an extensive and beautiful view. But 
the space has been too closely built ; many of 
the houses front the wrong way, intent, like 
the Man with the Muck-Rake, on what is not 
worth observation, and standing discourteously 

'15 



Town and Country 

back-foremost in the ranks ; and, in a word, 
it is too often only from attic-windows, or here 
and there at a crossing, that you can get a look 
beyond the city upon its diversified surround- 
ings. But perhaps it is all the more surprising 
to come suddenly on a corner and see a per- 
spective of a mile or more of falling street, 
and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue 
arm of the sea, and the hills upon the farther 
side. 

Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's 
model, once saw a butterfly at the Town 
Cross ; and the sight inspired him with a 
worthless little ode. This painted countryman, 
the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad 
in such a humming neighbourhood ; and you 
can fancy what moral considerations a youthful 
poet would supply. But the incident, in a 
fanciful sort of way, is characteristic of the 
place. Into no other city does the sight of 
the country enter so far ; if you do not meet 
a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse 

ii6 



Town and Country 

of far-away trees upon your walk ; and the 
place is full of theatre tricks in the way of 
scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend 
stairs that look as if they would land you in 
a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a 
grimy tenement in a lane : — and behold ! you 
are face-to-face with distant and bright pro- 
spects. You turn a corner, and there is the 
sun going down into the Highland hills. You 
look down an alley, and see ships tacking for 
the Baltic. 

For the country people to see Edinburgh 
on her hill-tops, is one thing ; it is another for 
the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to 
overlook the country. It should be a genial 
and ameliorating influence in life ; it should 
prompt good thoughts and remind him of 
Nature's unconcern : that he can watch from 
day to day, as he trots officeward, how the 
Spring green brightens in the wood or the 
held grows black under a moving ploughshare. 
I have been tempted, in this connexion, to 

117 



'Town and Country 

deplore the slender faculties of the human race, 
with its penny-whistle of a voice, its dull ears, 
and its narrow range of sight. If you could 
see as people are to see in heaven, if you had 
eyes such as you can fancy for a superior race, 
if you could take clear note of the objects of 
vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles 
from where you stand : — think how agreeably 
your sight would be entertained, how pleasantly 
your thoughts would be diversified, as you 
walked the Edinburgh streets ! For you might 
pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst 
of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye 
of a shepherd as he sat down to breathe upon 
a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands ; or per- 
haps some urchin, clambering in a country 
elm, would put aside the leaves and show you 
his flushed and rustic visage ; or a fisher racing 
seawards, with the tiller under his elbow, and 
the sail sounding in the wind, would fling you 
a salutation from between Anst'er and the 
May. 



'Town and Country 

To be old is not the same thing as to be 
picturesque ; nor because the Old Town bears 
a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow 
that the New Town shall look commonplace. 
Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is curious 
how much description would apply commonly 
to either. The same sudden accidents of 
ground, a similar dominating site above the 
plain, and the same superposition of one rank 
of society over another, are to be observed in 
both. Thus, the broad and comely approach 
to Princes Street from the east, lined with 
hotels and public offices, makes a leap over 
the gorge of the Low Calton ; if you cast a 
glance over the parapet, you look direct into 
that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith 
Street ; and the same tall houses open upon 
both thoroughfares. This is only the New 
Town passing overhead above its own cellars ; 
walking, so to speak, over its own children, 
as is the way of cities and the human race. 
Rut at the Dean Bridge you may behold a 

N 1 19 



'Town and Country 

spectacle of a more novel order. The river 
runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among 
rocks and between gardens ; the crest of either 
bank is occupied by some of the most com- 
modious streets and crescents in the modern 
city ; and a handsome bridge unites the two 
summits. Over this, every afternoon, private 
carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card- 
cases pass to and fro about the duties of society. 
And yet down below, you may still see, with 
its mills and foaming weir, the little rural 
village of Dean. Modern improvement has 
gone overhead on its high-level viaduct ; and 
the extended city has clear V overleapt, and 
left unaltered, what was once the summer 
retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town 
embraces hamlets in its growth ; Edinburgh 
herself has embraced a good few \ but it is 
strange to see one still surviving — and to see 
it some hundreds of feet below your path. 
Is it Torre del Greco that is built above 
buried Herculaneum ? Herculaneum was dead 



A,Si5 



Princes Street, Kdinhurgh. 



Town a Nil Country 

at least ; but thc^ sun still shines upon the 
roofs of Dean ; the smoke still rises thriftily 
from its chimneys ; the dusty miller comes 
to his door, looks at the gurgling water, 
hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds 
about the shed, and perhaps whistles an air 
of his own to enrich the symphony — for all 
the world as if Edinburgh were still the old 
Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were 
still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile or 
so in the green country. 

It is not so long ago since magisterial 
David Hume lent the authority of his example 
to the exodus from the Old Town, and took 
up his new abode in a street which is still 
(so oddly may a jest become perpetuated) 
known as Saint David Street. Nor is the 
town so large but a holiday schoolboy may 
harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his 
own door. There are places that still smell 
of the plough in memory's nostrils. Here, 
one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn ; 

123 



Town and Country 

there, another was taken on summer evenings 
to eat strawberries and cream ; and you have 
seen a waving wheatfield on the site of your 
present residence. The memories of an Edin- 
, burgh boy are but partly memories of the 
town. I look back with delight on many 
an escalade of garden walls ; many a ramble 
among lilacs full of piping birds ; many an 
exploration in obscure quarters that were neither 
town nor country ; and I think that both for 
my companions and myself there was a special 
interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment 
as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excur- 
sions on the butt-end of some former hamlet, 
and found a few rustic cottages embedded 
among streets and squares. The tunnel to the 
Scotland Street Station, the sight of the train 
shooting out of its dark maw with the two 
guards upon the brake, the thought of its 
length and the many ponderous edifices and 
open thoroughferes above, were certainly things 
of paramount impressiveness to a young mind. 
124 



Town and Country 

It was a subterranean passage, although of a 
larger bore than we were accustomed to in 
Ainsworth's novels ; and these two words, 
* subterranean passage,' were in themselves an 
irresistible attraction, and seemed to bring us 
nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and 
the black rascals we secretly aspired to imitate. 
To scale the Castle Rock from West Princes 
Street Gardens, and lay a triumphal hand 
against the rampart itself, was to taste a high 
order of romantic pleasure. And there are 
other sights and exploits which crowd back 
upon my mind under a very strong illumina- 
tion of remembered pleasure. But the effect 
of not one of them all will compare with the 
discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time 
and his slow changes on the fice of this earth, 
with which I explored such corners as Canon- 
mills or Water Lane, or the nugget of cottages 
at Broughton Market. They were more rural 
than the open country, and gave a greater 
impression of antiquity than the oldest laful 

125 



'Town and Country 

upon the High Street. They too, Hkc Fergus- 
son's butterfly, had a quaint air of having 
wandered far from their own place ; they 
looked abashed and homely, with their gables 
and their creeping plants, their outside stairs 
and running mill-streams ; there were corners 
that smelt like the end of the country garden 
where I spent my Aprils ; and the people 
stood to gossip at their doors, as they might 
have done in Colinton or Cramond. 

In a great measure we may, and shall, 
eradicate this haunting flavour of the country. 
The last elm is dead in Elm Row ; and the 
villas and the workmen's quarters spread apace 
on all the borders of the city. We can cut 
down the trees ; we can bury the grass under 
dead paving-stones ; we can drive brisk streets 
through all our sleepy quarters ; and we may 
forget the stories and the playgrounds of our 
boyhood. But we have some possessions that 
not even the infuriate zeal ot builders can 
utterly abolish or destroy. Nothing can abolish 

126 



Holymod I'al.uc from the Calion Mill. 



Town and Country 

the hills, unless it be a cataclysm of nature 
which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself 
and lay all her florid structures in the dust. 
And as long as we have the hills and the 
Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our 
children. Our windows, at no expense to us, 
are most artfully stained to represent a land- 
scape. And when the Spring comes round, 
and the hawthorns begin to flower, and the 
meadows to smell of young grass, even in the 
thickest of our streets, the country hilltops 
hnd out a young man's eyes, and set his heart 
beating for travel and pure air. 



129 



THE VILLA QUARTERS 



CHAPTER VII 

THE VILLA QUARTERS 

MR. RUSKIN'S denunciation of the 
New Town of Edinburgh includes, 
as I have heard it repeated, nearly all 
the stone and lime we have to show. Many 
however find a grand air and something settled 
and imposing in the better parts ; and upon 
many, as I have said, the confusion of styles 
induces an agreeable stimulation of the mind. 
But upon the subject of our recent villa archi- 
tecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears 
with Mr. Ruskin's, and it is a subject which 
makes one envious of his large declamatory and 
controversial eloquence. 

Day by day, one new villa, one new object of 
offence, is added to another ; all around Newing- 
ton and Morningside, the dismallest structures 

133 



'The Villa garters 

keep springing up like mushrooms ; the pleasant 
hills are loaded with them, each impudently 
squatted in its garden, each roofed and carrying 
chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an 
eye discovers their true character. They are not 
houses ; for they were not designed with a view 
to human habitation, and the internal arrange- 
ments are, as they tell me, fantastically unsuited 
to the needs of man. They are not buildings ; for 
you can scarcely say a thing is built where every 
measurement is in clamant disproportion with 
its neighbour. They belong to no style of art, 
only to a form of business much to be regretted. 

Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure 
where the size of the windows bears no rational 
relation to the size of the front ? Is there any 
profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk ? Does a 
hard-working, greedy builder gain more on a 
monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal 
plainness ? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks 
may be omitted, and green timber employed, in 
the construction of even a very elegant design \ 

134 



The Villa garters 

and there is no reason why a chimney should be 
made to vent, because it is so situated as to look 
comely from without. On the other hand, there 
is a noble way of being ugly : a high-aspiring 
fiasco like the fill of Lucifer. There are daring 
and gaudy buildings that manage to be offensive, 
without being contemptible ; and we know that 
' fools rush in where angels fear to tread.' But 
to aim at making a commonplace villa, and to 
make it insufferably ugly in each particular ; to 
attempt the homeliest achievement, and to attain 
the bottom of derided failure ; not to have any 
theory but proht, and yet, at an equal expense, to 
outstrip all competitors in the art of conceiving 
and rendering permanent deformity ; and to do 
all this in what is, by nature, one of the most 
agreeable neighbourhoods in Britain : — what are 
we to say, but that this also is a distinction, hard 
to earn, although not greatly worshipful ? 

Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensi- 
tive ; but these things offend the plainest taste. 
It is a danger which threatens the amenity of the 

135 



The Villa garters 

town ; and as this eruption keeps spreading on 
our borders, we have ever the farther to walk 
among unpleasant sights, before we gain the 
country air. If the population of Edinburgh were 
a living, autonomous body, it would arise like one 
man and make night hideous with arson ; the 
builders and their accomplices would be driven to 
work, like the Jews of yore, with the trowel in 
one hand and the defensive cutlass in the other ; 
and as soon as one of these masonic wonders had 
been consummated, right - minded iconoclasts 
should fall thereon and make an end of it at 
once. 

Possibly these words may meet the eye of a 
builder or two. It is no use asking them to 
employ an architect ; for that would be to touch 
them in a delicate quarter, and its use would 
largely depend on what architect they were 
minded to call in. But let them get any archi- 
tect in the world to point out any reasonably 
well-proportioned villa, not his own design ; and 
let them reproduce that model to satiety. 

136 



THE CALTON HILL 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CALTON HILL 

THE cast of new Edinburgh is guarded by 
a craggy hill, of no great elevation, 
which the town embraces. The old 
London road runs on one side of it ; while the 
New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, 
completes the circuit. You mount by stairs in a 
cutting of the rock to find yourself in a field of 
monuments. Dugald Stewart has the honours of 
situation and architecture ; Burns is memorialised 
lower down upon a spur ; Lord Nelson, as befits 
a sailor, gives his name to the topgallant of the 
Calton Hill. This latter erection has been 
differently and yet, in both cases, aptly compared 
to a telescope and a butter-churn ; comparisons 
apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handi- 
works. But the chief feature is an unfinished 
p 139 



rhe Calton Hill 

range of columns, ' the Modern Ruin ' as it has 
been called, an imposing object from fir and near, 
and giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that 
fiilse air of a Modern Athens which has earned for 
her so many slighting speeches. It was meant to 
be a National Monument ; and its present state 
is a very suitable monument to certain national 
characteristics. The old Observatory — a quaint 
brown building on the edge of the steep — and 
the new Observatory — a classical edifice with a 
dome — occupy the central portion of the summit. 
All these are scattered on a green turf, browsed 
over by some sheep. 

The scene suggests reflections on fame and 
on man's injustice to the dead. You see Dugald 
Stewart rather more handsomely commemorated 
than Burns. Immediately below, in the Canon- 
gate churchyard, lies Robert Fergusson, Burns's 
master in his art, who died insane while yet a 
stripling ; and if Dugald Stewart has been some- 
what too boisterously acclaimed, the Edinburgh 
poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously 

140 



■'&'i'MSiBtM 



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f 




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m 


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Edinbur<>:li from the Calton Hi 



The Calton Hill 

forgotten. The votaries of Burns, a crew too 
common in all ranks in Scotland, and more 
remarkable for number than discretion, eagerly 
suppress all mention of the lad who handed to 
him the poetic impulse and, up to the time when 
he grew famous, continued to influence him in 
his manner and the choice of subjects. Burns 
himself not only acknowledged his debt in a 
fragment of autobiography, but erected a tomb 
over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This 
was worthy of an artist, but it was done in vain ; 
and although I think I have read nearly all the 
biographies of Burns, I cannot remember one in 
which the modesty of nature was not violated, or 
where Fcrgusson was not sacrificed to the credit 
of his follower's originality. There is a kind of 
gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare 
and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to 
gape at ; and a class of men who cannot edit one 
author without disparaging all others. They are 
indeed mistaken if they think to please the great 
originals \ and whoever puts Fergusson right 

H3 



I'he Calton Hill 

with fame, cannot do better than dedicate his 
labours to the memory of Burns, who will be 
the best delighted of the dead. 

Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is 
perhaps the best ; since you can see the Castle, 
which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's 
Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat. 
It is the place to stroll on one of those days of 
sunshine and east wind which are so common in 
our more than temperate summer. The breeze 
comes off the sea, with a little of the freshness, 
and that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter, 
which is delightful to certain very ruddy organi- 
sations and greatly the reverse to the majority of 
mankind. It brings with it a fiint, floating haze, 
a cunning decolouriser, although not thick enough 
to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies 
more thickly to windward at the far end of Mussel- 
burgh Bay ; and over the Links of Aberlady and 
Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Rock it 
assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea fog. 

Immediately underneath upon the south, you 

144 



The Calton Hill 

comm:ind the yards of the High School, and the 
towers and courts of the new Jail — a large place, 
castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself 
on the edge of a steep cliff, and often joyRilly 
hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the one, you 
may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise 
like a string of nuns ; in the other, schoolboys 
running at play and their shadows keeping step 
with them. From the bottom of the valley, a 
gigantic chimney rises almost to the level of the 
eye, a taller and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's 
Monument. Look a little firther, and there is 
Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and 
ruined abbey, and the red sentry pacing smartly 
to and fro before the door like a mechanical 
figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, 
you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, 
over which Rizzio's murderers made their escape 
and where Queen Mary herself, according to 
gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her 
loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the Queen's 
Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. 

H5 



The Calton Hill 

Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury 
Crags : and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark 
and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of 
Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain 
in virtue of its bold design. This upon your left. 
Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old 
Town climb one above another to where the 
citadel prints its broad bulk and jagged crown of 
bastions on the western sky. — Perhaps it is now 
one in the afternoon ; and at the same instant of 
time, a ball rises to the summit of Nelson's flag- 
staff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke 
followed by a report bursts from the half-moon 
battery at the Castle. This is the time-gun by 
which people set their watches, as far as the sea 
coast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands. — To 
complete the view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, 
black with traffic, and has a broad look over the 
valley between the Old Town and the New : 
here, ftiU of railway trains and stepped over by 
the high North Bridge upon its many columns, 
and there, green with trees and gardens. 
146 



The Castle from the Grassmarket. 



^^1^ 

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The Calton Hill 

On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so 
abrupt in itself nor has it so exceptional an out- 
look ; and yet even here it commands a striking 
prospect. A gully separates it from the New 
Town. This is Greenside, where witches were 
burned and tournaments held in former days. 
Down that almost precipitous bank Bothwell 
launched his horse, and so first, as they say, 
attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now 
tessellated with sheets and blankets out to dry, 
and the sound of people beating carpets is rarely 
absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run out 
to Leith ; Leith camps on the seaside with her 
forest of masts ; Leith roads are full of ships at 
anchor ; the sun picks out the white pharos 
upon Inchkcith Island ; the Firth extends on 
either hand from the Ferry to the May ; the 
towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of blowing 
smoke, along the opposite coast ; and the hills 
enclose the view, except to the farthest east, 
where the haze of the horizon rests upon the 
open sea. There lies the road to Norway : a 

149 



"The Calton Hill 

dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots 
Lords ; and yonder smoke on the hither side 
of Largo Law is Aberdour, from whence they 
sailed to seek a queen for Scotland : — 

' O, lang, lang, may the ladies sit, 
Wi' their fans into their hand, 
Or e'er they see Sir Patrick Spens 
Come sailing to the land ! ' 

The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring 
thoughts of storm and sea disaster. The sailors' 
wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of Cockenzie, 
not sitting languorously with fans, but crowding 
to the tail of the harbour with a shawl about 
their ears, may still look vainly for brave Scots- 
men who will return no more, or boats that have 
gone on their last fishing. Since Sir Patrick 
sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude have 
gone down in the North Sea ! Yonder is Auld- 
hame, where the London smack went ashore and 
wreckers cut the rings from ladies' fingers ; and 
a few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, 
now a star of guidance ; and the lee shore to 
150 



mMmm^ 



The Castle tVoni Princes Street (iard 



The Calton Hill 

the west of the Inchcape, is that Forflirshire coast 
where Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son. 

These are the main features of the scene 
roughly sketched. How they are all tilted by 
the inclination of the ground, how each stands 
out in delicate relief against the rest, what mani- 
fold detail, and play of sun and shadow, animate 
and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a 
person on the spot, and turning swiftly on his 
heels, to grasp and bind together in one com- 
prehensive look. It is the character of such a 
prospect, to be full of change and of things 
moving. The multiplicity embarrasses the eye ; 
and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to 
grow absorbed with single points. You remark 
a tree in a hedgerow, or follow a cart along a 
country road. You turn to the city, and see 
children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at 
play about suburban doorsteps ; you have a 
glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are 
densely moving ; you note ridge after ridge of 
chimney-stacks running downhill one behind 
Q 153 



The Calton Hill 

another, and church spires rising bravely from 
the sea of roofs. At one of the innumerable 
windows, you watch a figure moving ; on one 
of the multitude of roofs, you watch clambering 
chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run and 
scatters the smoke \ bells are heard, far and 
near, faint and loud, to tell the hour ; or per- 
haps a bird goes dipping evenly over the house- 
tops, like a gull across the waves. And here 
you are in the meantime, on this pastoral hill- 
side, among nibbling sheep and looked upon by 
monumental buildings. 

Return thither on some clear, dark, moon- 
less night, with a ring of frost in the air, and 
only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of 
heaven ; and you will find a sight as stimulat- 
ing as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The 
solitude seems perfect ; the patient astronomer, 
flat on his back under the Observatory dome 
and spying heaven's secrets, is your only neigh- 
bour ; and yet from all around you there come 
up the dull hum of the city, the tramp of 

154 



The Calton Hill 

countless people marching out of time, the rattle 
of carriages and the continuous keen jingle of 
the tramway bells. An hour or so before, the 
gas was turned on ; lamplighters scoured the 
city ; in every house, from kitchen to attic, 
the windows kindled and gleamed forth into the 
dusk. And so now, although the town lies blue 
and darkling on her hills, innumerable spots of 
the bright element shine fir and near along the 
pavements and upon the high fa9ades. Moving 
lights of the railway pass and repass below the 
stationary lights upon the bridge. Lights burn 
in the Jail. Lights burn high up in the tall 
lands and on the Castle turrets, they burn low 
down in Greenside or along the Park. They 
run out one beyond the other into the dark 
country. They walk in a procession down to 
Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier. 
Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is 
mapped out upon the ground of blackness, as 
when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes 
and exposes it before a candle ; not the darkest 

»55 



The Calton Hill 

night of winter can conceal her high station and 
fanciful design ; every evening in the year she 
proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her 
qwvl beauty ; and as if to complete the scheme 
— or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were 
beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and 
country — half-way over to Fife, there is an out- 
post of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward, 
yet another on the May. 

And while you are looking, across upon the 
Castle Hill, the drums and bugles begin to recall 
the scattered garrison ; the air thrills with the 
sound ; the bugles sing aloud ; and the last 
rising flourish mounts and melts into the dark- 
ness like a star : a martial swan- song, fitly 
rounding in the labours of the day. 



156 



WINTER AND NEW YEAR 



CHAPTER IX 
WINTER AND NEW YEAR 

THE Scots dialect is singularly rich in 
terms of reproach against the winter 
wind. Sncll^ blae^ ^^i^^y-^ and scow- 
thering^ are four of these significant vocables ; 
they are all words that carry a shiver with 
them ; and for my part, as I see them aligned 
before me on the page, I am persuaded that a 
big wind comes tearing over the Firth from 
Burntisland and the northern hills ; I think I 
can hear it howl in the chimney, and as I set 
my fice northwards, feel its smarting kisses on 
my cheek. Even in the names of places there 
is often a desolate, inhospitable sound ; and I 
remember two from the near neighbourhood of 
lulinburgh, Cauldhame and Blaw-weary, that 
would promise but starving comfort to their 

'59 



IVinter and !]\(cw Year 

inhahiumts. The inclemency of heaven, which 
has thus endowed the language of Scotland with 
words, has also largely modihed the spirit of its 
poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate 
teach men the love of the hearth and the senti- 
ment of the fimily ; and the latter, in its own 
right, inclines a poet to the praise of strong 
waters. In Scotland, all our singers have a 
stave or two for blazing fires and stout pota- 
tions : — to get indoors (Hit (^f the wind and to 
swallow something hot to the stomach, are 
benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt I 

And this is not only so in country districts 
where the shepherd must wade in the snow all 
day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and 
nowhere more apparently stated than in the 
works of our Edinburgh poet, Fergusson. He 
was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly 
slunk from the robustious winter to an inn 
fireside. Love was absent from his life, or only 
present, if you prefer, in such a form that even 
the least serious of Burns's amourettes was 

i6o 



Duddiiiuston Locli iiiid Arthur's Scat. 



t* 



Wj 



Winter and U^w Year 

ennobling by comparison ; and so there is 
nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor 
revelry which pervades the poor boy's verses. 
Although it is characteristic of his native town, 
and the manners of its youth to the present day, 
this spirit has perhaps done something to restrict 
his popularity. He recalls a supper- party 
pleasantry with something akin to tenderness ; 
and sounds the praises of the act of drinking 
as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in itsel£ 
The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern 
parlours, and the revelry of lawyers' clerks, do 
not offer by themselves the materials of a rich 
existence. It was not choice, so much as an 
external fate, that kept Fergusson in this round 
of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic tempera- 
ment, and without religious exaltation, drops as 
if by nature into the public-house. The picture 
may not be pleasing ; but what else is a man to 
do in this dog's weather ? 

To none but those who have themselves 
suffered the thing in the body, can the gloom 

163 



JVinter and !}{ew Year 

and depression of our Edinburgh winters be 
brought home. For some constitutions there 
is something almost physically disgusting in the 
bleak ugliness of easterly weather ; the wind 
wearies, the sickly sky depresses them ; and 
they turn back from their walk to avoid the 
aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among 
perturbed and pallid mists. The days are so 
short that a man does much of his business, and 
certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare 
of gas lamps. The roads are as heavy as a 
fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle- 
tailed that I have often wondered how they 
found the heart to undress. And meantime the 
wind whistles through the town as if it were an 
open meadow ; and if you lie awake all night, 
you hear it shrieking and raving overhead with 
a noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In 
a word, life is so unsightly that there are times 
when the heart turns sick in a man's inside ; 
and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the 
warm, fire-lit study, is like the touch of land 
164 





k 


1 



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Lw^^ 


m-- 


Qkl 


i|¥n 




^.' ^^ 



High Scliool Wyinl, looking towards the Cowgate. 



Winter and J\(ew Year 

to one who has been long struggling with the 
seas. 

As the weather hardens towards frost, the 
world begins to improve for Edinburgh people. 
We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the 
profile of the city stamped in indigo upon a 
sky of luminous green. The wind may still be 
cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs 
good blood. People do not all look equally 
sour and downcast. They fall into two divi- 
sions : one, the knight of the blue face and 
hollow paunch, whom Winter has gotten by the 
vitals ; the other well lined with New-year's 
fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his 
periphery, but stepping through it by the glow 
of his internal fires. Such an one I remember, 
triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of 
temperature could vanquish. ' Well,' would be 
his jovial salutation, * here 's a sneezer ! ' And 
the look of these warm fellows is tonic, and up- 
holds their drooping fellow-townsmen. There 
is yet another class who do not depend on 

167 



Winter and U^w Year 

corporal advantages, but support the winter in 
virtue of a brave and merry heart. One shiver- 
ing evening, cold enough for frost but with too 
high a wind, and a little past sundown, when 
the lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles 
in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies 
were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the 
wind. If the one was as much as nine, the 
other was certainly not more than seven. They 
were miserably clad ; and the pavement was so 
cold, you would have thought no one could 
lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they 
came along waltzing, if you please, while the 
elder sang a tune to give them music. The 
person who saw this, and whose heart was full 
of bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof 
which has been of use to him ever since, and 
which he now hands on, with his good wishes, 
to the reader. 

At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite 
hills and all the sloping country, are sheeted 
up in white. If it has happened in the dark 

i68 



JJ^ inter and O^w Year 

hours, nurses pluck their children out of bed 
and run with them to some commanding 
window, whence they may see the change that 
has been worked upon earth's face. '■ A' the 
hills are covered wi' snaw,' they sing, 'and 
Winter 's noo come fiiirly ! ' And the children, 
marvelling at the silence and the white land- 
scape, find a spell appropriate to the season in 
the words. The reverberation of the snow in- 
creases the pale daylight, and brings all objects 
nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and 
glittering, with here and there the black ribbon 
of a dry-stone dyke, and here and there, if there 
be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a 
shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, 
that a man might almost jump across, between 
well-powdered Lothian and well-powdered Fife. 
And the effect is not, as in other cities, a thing 
of half a day ; the streets are soon trodden 
black, but the country keeps its virgin white ; 
and you have only to lift your eyes and look 
over miles of country snow. An indescribable 

169 



Winter and !}(ew Year 

cheerfulness breathes about the city ; and the 
well-fed heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the 
bosom. It is New-year's weather. 

New-year's Day, the great national festival, 
is a time of family expansions and of deep 
carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate 
for this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary 
falls upon a Sunday, when the public-houses 
are inexorably closed, when singing and even 
whistling is banished from our homes and high- 
ways, and the oldest toper feels called upon to 
go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between 
two loyalties, the Scots have to decide many 
nice cases of conscience, and ride the marches 
narrowly between the weekly and the annual 
observance. A party of convivial musicians, 
next door to a friend of mine, hung suspended 
in this manner on the brink of their diversions. 
From ten o'clock on Sunday night, my friend 
heard them tuning their instruments : and as 
the hour of liberty drew near, each must have 
had his music open, his bow in readiness across 

170 



Craiemillar Castle. 



ftl 




^ ..^. 



JJ^ niter and 0\(ew Yair 

the hddlc, his foot already raised to mark the 
time, and his nerves braced for execution ; for 
hardly had the twelfth stroke sounded from the 
earliest steeple, before they had launched forth 
into a secular bravura. 

Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all 
households. For weeks before the great morn- 
ing, confectioners display stacks of Scots bun 
— a dense, black substance, inimical to life — 
and full moons of shortbread adorned with 
mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of 
the season and the family affections. ' Frae 
Auld Reekie,' ' A guid New Year to ye a',' 
* For the Auld Folk at Hame,' are among the 
most favoured of these devices. Can you not 
see the carrier, after half a day's journey on 
pinching hill-roads, draw up before a cottage 
in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor Glen among 
the rowans, and the old people receiving the 
parcel with moist eyes and a prayer for )()ck or 
Jean in the city ? For at this season, on the 
threshold of another year of calamity and 

•73 



JVinter and U^w Year 

stubborn conflict, men feel a need to draw 
closer the links that unite them ; they reckon 
the number of their friends, like allies before 
a war ; and the prayers grow longer in the 
morning as the absent are recommended by 
name into God's keeping. 

On the day itself, the shops are all shut as 
on a Sunday ; only taverns, toyshops, and other 
holiday magazines, keep open doors. Every 
one looks for his handsel. The postman and 
the lamplighters have left, at every house in 
their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking 
and thanking in a breath ; and it is characteristic 
of Scotland that these verses may have some- 
times a touch of reality in detail or sentiment 
and a measure of strength in the handling. All 
over the town, you may see comforter'd school- 
boys hasting to squander their half-crowns. 
There are an infinity of visits to be paid ; all 
the world is in the street, except the daintier 
classes ; the sacramental greeting is heard upon 
all sides ; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's 

174 



h 






' .'W 




■ i : 




■■«. 








The Marquis ot Huntly's House, Bakehouse Close 
Canongate. 



IVinter and U^w Year 

mouths ; and whisky and shortbread are staple 
articles of consumption. From an early hour 
a stranger will be impressed by the number of 
drunken men ; and by afternoon drunkenness 
has spread to the women. With some classes 
of society, it is as much a matter of duty to 
drink hard on New-year's Day as to go to 
church on Sunday. Some have been saving 
their wages for perhaps a month to do the 
season honour. Many carry a whisky-bottle in 
their pocket, which they will press with embar- 
rassing effusion on a perfect stranger. It is not 
expedient to risk one's body in a cab, or not, 
at least, until after a prolonged study of the 
driver. The streets, which are thronged from 
end to end, become a place for delicate pilotage. 
Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others 
noisy and quarrelsome, the votaries of the New 
Year go meandering in and out and cannoning 
one against another ; and now and again, one 
falls and lies as he has fallen. Before night, so 
many have gone to bed or the police office, 
s 177 



Winter and !?{ew Year 

that the streets seem almost clearer. And as 
guisards and Jirst-footers are now not much 
seen except in country places, when once the 
New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at 
the Tron railings, the festivities begin to find 
their way indoors and something like quiet 
returns upon the town. But think, in these 
piled lands^ of all the senseless snorers, all the 
broken heads and empty pockets ! 

Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene 
of heroic snowballing ; and one riot obtained 
the epic honours of military intervention. But 
the great generation, I am afraid, is at an end ; 
and even during my own college days, the spirit 
appreciably declined. Skating and sliding, on 
the other hand, are honoured more and more ; 
and curling, being a creature of the national 
genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The 
patriotism that leads a man to eat Scotch bun 
will scarce desert him at the curling- pond. 
Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is 
the proper home of sliders ; many a happy 
178 



Winter and !?{ew Year 

urchin can slide the whole way to school ; and 
the profession of errand-boy is transformed into 
a holiday amusement. As for skating, there is 
scarce any city so handsomely provided. Dud- 
dingston Loch lies under the abrupt southern 
side of Arthur's Seat ; in summer a shield of 
blue, with swans sailing from the reeds ; in 
winter, a field of ringing ice. The village 
church sits above it on a green promontory ; 
and the village smoke rises from among goodly 
trees. At the church gates, is the historical 
jougs, a place of penance for the neck of 
detected sinners, and the historical iouping-on 
siane, from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers 
climbed into the saddle. Here Prince Charlie 
slept before the battle of Prestonpans ; and here 
Deacon Brodie, or one of his gang, stole a 
plough coulter before the burglary in Chessel's 
Court. On the opposite side of the loch, the 
ground rises to Craigmillar Castle, a place 
friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is worth a 
climb, even in summer, to look down upon the 

179 



JVinter and ?\(ew Year 

loch from Arthur's Seat ; but it is tenfold more 
so on a day of skating. The surface is thick 
with people moving easily and swiftly and 
leaning over at a thousand graceful inclinations ; 
the crowd opens and closes, and keeps moving 
through itself like water ; and the ice rings to 
half a mile away, with the flying steel. As 
night draws on, the single figures melt into the 
dusk, until only an obscure stir, and coming 
and going of black clusters, is visible upon the 
loch. A little longer, and the first torch is 
kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice 
in a ring of yellow reflection, and this is followed 
by another and another, until the whole field is 
full of skimming lights. 



i8o 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 



CHAPTER X 
TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 

ON three sides of Edinburgh, the country 
slopes downward from the city, here 
to the sea, there to the fat farms of 
Haddington, there to the mineral fields of 
Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising 
until it not only out-tops the Castle but looks 
down on Arthur's Seat. The character of the 
neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a 
scarcity of hedges ; by many stone walls of 
varying height ; by a fair amount of timber, 
some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, 
northern profile and poor in foliage ; by here 
and there a little river, Esk or Leith or Almond, 
busily journeying in the bottom of its glen ; 
and from almost every point, by a peep of the 
sea or the hills. There is no lack of variety, 

'83 



To the Tentland Hills 

and yet most of the elements are common to 
all parts ; and the southern district is alone dis- 
tinguished by considerable summits and a wide 
view. 

From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish 
army encamped before Flodden, the road de- 
scends a long hill, at the bottom of which and 
just as it is preparing to mount up on the other 
side, it passes a toll-bar and issues at once into 
the open country. Even as I write these words, 
they are becoming antiquated in the progress of 
events, and the chisels are tinkling on a new 
row of houses. The builders have at length 
adventured beyond the toll which held them in 
respect so long, and proceed to career in these 
fresh pastures like a herd of colts turned loose. 
As Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an 
architect by way of stimulation, a man, looking 
on these doomed meads, imagines a similar 
example to deter the builders ; for it seems as 
if it must come to an open fight at last to 
preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. 



The Pentlaiid Hills from Swanston. 
























•'^*'" 



)f/V '"■ _v-' 









^.<fi^. 



/ i" 



^;%li«'f-4! 






To the Tentland Hills 

And here, appropriately enough, there stood in 
old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies 
hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a 
child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the 
gibbet had been hxed. People of a willing 
fency were persuaded, and sought to persuade 
others, that this stone was never dry. And no 
wonder, they would add, for the two men had 
only stolen fourpence between them. 

For about two miles the road climbs up- 
wards, a long hot walk in summer time. You 
reach the summit at a place where four ways 
meet, beside the toll of Fairmilehead. The 
spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and 
aspect. The hills are close by across a valley : 
Kirk Yetton, with its long, upright scars visible 
as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on this 
side : with wood and tilled field running high 
up on their borders, and haunches all moulded 
into innumerable glens and shelvings and varie- 
gated with heather and fern. The air comes 
briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the 

T 187 



To the Tentland Hills 

elevation and rustically scented by the upland 
plants ; and even at the toll you may hear the 
curlew calling on its mate. At certain seasons, 
when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the 
birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream 
together in the same field by Fairmilehead. 
The winged, wild things intermix their wheel- 
ings, the sea-birds skim the tree-tops and fish 
among the furrows of the plough. These little 
craft of air are at home in all the world, so long 
as they cruise in their own element ; and, like 
sailors, ask but food and water from the shores 
they coast. 

Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow 
Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but once a distillery 
of whisky. It chanced, some time in the past 
century, that the distiller was on terms of good - 
fellowship with the visiting officer of excise. 
The latter was of an easy, friendly disposition, 
and a master of convivial arts. Now and again, 
he had to walk out of Edinburgh to measure 
the distiller's stock ; and although it was 
i88 



Duddiiigstoii Church from the Loch. 



To the Tentland Hills 

agreeable to hnd his business lead him in a 
friend's direction, it was unfortunate that the 
friend should be a loser by his visits. Accord- 
ingly, when he got about the level of Fairmile- 
head, the gauger would take his flute, without 
which he never travelled, from his pocket, fit it 
together, and set manRilly to playing, as if for 
his own delectation and inspired by the beauty 
of the scene. His favourite air, it seems, was 
* Over the hills and far away.' At the first 
note, the distiller pricked his ears. A flute at 
Fairmilehead ? and playing ' Over the hills and 
far away ' ? This must be his friendly enemy, 
the gauger. Instantly, horses were harnessed, 
and sundry barrels of whisky were got upon a 
cart, driven at a gallop round Hill End, and 
buried in the mossy glen behind Kirk Yetton. 
In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl 
was put to the fire, and the whitest napery 
prepared for the back parlour. A little after, 
the gauger, having had his fill of music for the 
moment, came strolling down with the most 

191 



To the Tcntland Hills 

innocent air imaginable, and found the good 
people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares 
by liis arrival, but none the less glad to see 
him. The distiller's liquor and the gauger's 
flute would combine to speed the moments of 
digestion ; and when both were somewhat 
mellow, they would wind up the evening with 
* Over the hills and far away ' to an accompani- 
ment of knowing glances. And at least, there 
is a smuggling story, with original and half- 
idyllic features. 

A little further, the road to the right passes 
an upright stone in a held. The country people 
call it General Kay's monument. According to 
them, an officer of that name had perished there 
in battle at some indistinct period before the 
beginning of history. The date is reassuring ; 
for 1 think cautious writers are silent on the 
General's exploits. But the stone is connected 
with one of those remarkable tenures of land 
which linger on into the modern world from 
Feudalism. Whenever the reigning sovereign 
192 



To the Tcntland Hills 

passes by, a certain landed proprietor is held 
bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, 
and sound a Hourish according to the measure 
of his knowledge in that art. Ilajipily for a 
respectable family, crowned heads have no great 
business in the Pentland Hills. But the story 
lends a character of comicality to the stone ; 
and the pisser-by will sometimes chuckle to 
himself. 

The district is dear to the superstitious. 
Hard by, at the back-gate of Comiston, a 
belated carter beheld a lady in white, ' with the 
most beautiful, clear shoes ujion her feet,' who 
looked upon him in a very ghastly manner and 
then vanished ; and just in front is the Hunters' 
Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not so long ago 
haunted by the devil in person. Satan led the 
inhabitants a pitiful existence. He shook the 
four corners of the building with lamentable 
outcries, beat at the doors and windows, over- 
threw crockery in the dead hours of the morning, 
and danced unholy dances on the roof Every 

193 



'To the Tentland Hills 

kind of spiritual disinfectant was put in requisi- 
tion ; chosen ministers were summoned out of 
Edinburgh and prayed by the hour ; pious 
neighbours sat up all night making a noise of 
psalmody ; but Satan minded them no more 
than the wind about the hill-tops ; and it was 
only after years of persecution, that he left the 
Hunters' Tryst in peace to occupy himself with 
the remainder of mankind. What with General 
Kay, and the white lady, and this singular 
visitation, the neighbourhood offers great facili- 
ties to the makers of sun-myths ; and without 
exactly casting in one's lot with that disenchant- 
ing school of writers, one cannot help hearing a 
good deal of the winter wind in the last story. 
' That nicht,' says Burns, in one of his happiest 
moments, — 

' That nicht a child might understand 
The deil had business on his hand.' 

And if people sit up all night in lone places on 
the hills, with Bibles and tremulous psalms, they 
will be apt to hear some of the most fiendish 
194 



The Castle from the \'ennel. 






1 




To the Tentland Hills 

noises in the world ; the wind will beat on 
doors and dance upon roofs for them, and make 
the hills howl around their cottage with a 
clamour like the judgment-day. 

The road goes down through another valley, 
and then finally begins to scale the main slope 
of the Pentlands. A bouquet of old trees stands 
round a white farmhouse ; and from a neigh- 
bouring dell, you can see smoke rising and 
leaves rufBing in the breeze. Straight above, 
the hills climb a thousand feet into the air. 
The neighbourhood, about the time of lambs, 
is clamorous with the bleating of flocks ; and 
you will be awakened, in the grey of early 
summer mornings, by the barking of a dog or 
the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes. 
This, with the hamlet lying behind unseen, is 
Swanston. 

The place in the dell is immediately con- 
nected with the city. Long ago, this sheltered 
field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates 
for the sake of the springs that rise or gather 

197 



To the Tentland Hills 

there. After they had built their water-house 
and laid their pipes, it occurred to them that 
the place was suitable for junketing. Once 
entertained, with jovial magistrates and public 
funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment ; 
and Edinburgh could soon boast of a municipal 
Pleasure House. The dell was turned into a 
garden ; and on the knoll that shelters it from 
the plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage 
looking to the hills. They brought crockets 
and gargoyles from old St. Giles's, which they 
were then restoring, and disposed them on the 
gables and over the door and about the garden ; 
and the quarry which had supplied them with 
building material, they draped with clematis and 
carpeted with beds of roses. So much for the 
pleasure of the eye ; for creature comfort, they 
made a capacious cellar in the hillside and fitted 
it with bins of the hewn stone. In process of 
time, the trees grew higher and gave shade to 
the cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and 
turned the dell into a thicket. There, purple 
198 



To the Tentland Hills 

magistrates relaxed themselves from the pursuit 
of municipal ambition ; cocked hats paraded 
soberly about the garden and in and out among 
the hollies ; authoritative canes drew ciphering 
upon the path ; and at night, from high up 
on the hills, a shepherd saw lighted windows 
through the foliage and heard the voice of city 
dignitaries raised in song. 

The farm is older. It was first a grange of 
Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and inhabited by rosy 
friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed 
into the hands of a true-blue Protestant family. 
During the Covenanting troubles, when a night 
conventicle was held upon the Pentlands, the farm 
doors stood hospitably open till the morning ; 
the dresser was laden with cheese and bannocks, 
milk and brandy ; and the worshippers kept 
slipping down from the hill between two exer- 
cises, as couples visit the supper-room between 
two dances of a modern ball. In the Forty-Five, 
some foraging Highlanders from Prince Charlie's 
army fell upon Swanston in the dawn. The 

u 199 



To the Tentland Hills 

great-grandfather of the late farmer was then a 
little child ; him they awakened by plucking the 
blankets from his bed, and he remembered, when 
he was an old man, their truculent looks and 
uncouth speech. The churn stood full of cream 
in the dairy, and with this they made their brose 
in high delight. ' It was braw brose,' said one 
of them. At last they made off, laden like 
camels with their booty ; and Swanston Farm 
has lain out of the way of history from that time 
forward. I do not know what may be yet in 
store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs 
low upon the hills, the house has a gloomy air as 
if suitable for private tragedy. But in hot July, 
you can fancy nothing more perfect than the 
garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and bright, 
old-fashioned flower-pots, and ending in a 
miniature ravine, all trellis-work and moss and 
tinkling waterfall, and housed from the sun 
under fathoms of broad foliage. 

The hamlet behind is one of the least con- 
siderable of hamlets, and consists of a few 

200 



The Hamlet of Swanston. 



1 



To the Tcntland Hills 

cottages on ;i green IksIiIc ;i Inirn. Some of 
them (a strange thing in Seotland) are models 
of internal neatness ; the beds adorned with 
patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow- 
pattern plates, the floors and tables bright with 
serubbing or pipe-elay, and the very kettle 
polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented 
old age in country places, where there is little 
matter for gossip and no street sights. I lousc- 
work becomes an art ; and at evening, when the 
cottage interior shines and twinkles in the glow 
of the fire, the housewife folds her hands and 
contemplates her fmished picture ; the snow 
and the winil may do their worst, she has made 
herself a pleasant corner in the worltl. The city 
might be a thousand miles away, and yet it was 
from close by that Mr. Hough jxiinted the distant 
view of Kdinburgh, which has been engraved for 
this collection ; and you have only to look at 
the etching,* to see how near it is at hand. But 
hills and hill people are not easily sophisticated ; 

> Published in the first Edition. 

203 



To the Tentland Hills 

and if you walk out here on a summer Sunday, 
it is as like as not the shepherd may set his dogs 
upon you. But keep an unmoved countenance : 
they look formidable at the charge, but their 
hearts are in the right place, and they will only 
bark and sprawl about you on the grass, un- 
mindful of their master's excitations. 

Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle 
of the range ; thence, the Pentlands trend off 
to south and west. From the summit you look 
over a great expanse of champaign sloping to 
the sea, and behold a large variety of distant 
hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of 
Peebles, the Lammermoors and the Ochils, more 
or less mountainous in outline, more or less 
blue with distance. Of the Pentlands them- 
selves, you see a field of wild heathery peaks 
with a pond gleaming in the midst ; and to that 
side the view is as desolate as if you were looking 
into Galloway or Applecross. To turn to the 
other is like a piece of travel. Far out in the 
Lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a 

204 



To the Tentland Hills 

great smoke on clear days and spreading her 
suburbs about her for miles •, the Castle rises 
darkly in the midst, and close by, Arthur's Seat 
makes a bold hgure in the landscape. All 
around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smok- 
ing villages, and white country roads, diversify 
the uneven surface of the land. Trains crawl 
slowly abroad upon the railway lines ; little 
ships are tacking in the Firth ; the shadow of 
a mountainous cloud, as large as a parish, travels 
before the wind ; the wind itself ruffles the 
wood and standing corn, and sends pulses of 
varying colour across the landscape. So you 
sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down 
from afar upon men's life. The city is as silent 
as a city of the dead : from all its humming 
thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches 
you upon the hill. The sea-surf, the cries of 
ploughmen, the streams and the mill-wheels, 
the birds and the wind, keep up an animated 
concert through the plain ; from farm to farm, 
dogs and crowing cocks contend together in 

205 



To the Tentland Htlls 

defiance ; and yet from this Olympian station, 
except for the whispering rumour of a train, 
the world has fallen into a dead silence, and 
the business of town and country grown voice- 
less in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the bleat 
of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, 
seem not so much to interrupt, as to accompany, 
the stillness ; but to the spiritual ear, the whole 
scene makes a music at once human and rural, 
and discourses pleasant reflections on the destiny 
of man. The spiry habitable city, ships, the 
divided fields, and browsing herds, and the 
straight highways, tell visibly of man's active 
and comfortable ways ; and you may be never 
so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but 
there is something in the view that spirits up 
your blood and puts you in the vein for cheerful 
labour. 

Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot 
of roof and a smoking chimney, where two 
roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect 
beside a hanging wood. If you are fenciful, 

206 



Tg the Tentland Hills 

you will be reminded of the gauger in the 
story. And the thought of this old excise- 
man, who once lipped and fingered on his 
pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the 
mountain air, and the words of the song he 
affected, carry your mind ' Over the hills and 
far away ' to distant countries ; and you have 
a vision of Edinburgh, not as you see her, 
in the midst of a little neighbourhood, but as 
a boss upon the round world with all Europe 
and the deep sea for her surroundings. For 
every place is a centre to the earth, whence 
highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign 
ports ; the limit of a parish is not more 
imaginary than the frontier of an empire ; 
and as a man sitting at home in his cabinet 
and swiftly writing books, so a city sends 
abroad an influence and a portrait of herself. 
There is no Edinburgh emigrant, far or near, 
from China to Peru, but he or she carries 
some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset 
behind the Castle cliffs, some snow scene, 

207 



To the Tentland Hills 

some maze of city lamps, indelible in the 
memory and delightful to study in the intervals 
of toil. For any such, if this book fall in their 
way, here are a few more home pictures. It 
would be pleasant, if they should recognise a 
house where they had dwelt, or a walk that 
they had taken. 



Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 

at the Edinburgh University Press 



